televised address that Berlusconi made from his office on 26 January 1994 was a striking intervention in public debate – Antonio Gibelli estimates that by the end of that evening some 26 million Italians had watched the speech, in whole or in part.8 But the entrepreneur’s decision to take to the field – and particularly his way of presenting it – also augured a new era in Italian politics, characterised by the cult of the reticent popular hero. In his address, the billion-aire cast himself as a humble son of Italy who had only reluctantly entered public life, unwilling as he was to live ‘in an illiberal country governed by men [the former Communists] double-bound to an economically and politically bankrupt past’.9 Berlusconi made ample reference to both his business experience and his newness to public life, an ‘anti-political’ message strengthened by his invocation of the needs of gente comune (‘ordinary folks’) rather than the more cohesive popolo. Berlusconi called for an end to party politics, a new era in which Italy would be governed by ‘wholly new men’ – his would be a ‘free organisation of voters’ – rather than the ‘umpteenth party or faction’. As against the ‘cartel of the forces of the Left’ (deemed ‘orphans of, and nostalgics for, communism’), he called for a ‘pole of freedoms’ to unite private enterprise and ‘love of work’ with the family values of Catholic Italy.10
The folksier tones of this message fed on a popular loss of faith in institutional elites. Yet Berlusconi’s message also called for a stop to the turbulence created by Clean Hands, here coded as a return to ‘calm’. He portrayed the PDS in terms of militancy and disruption, indeed in the most classically anti-Communist terms, accusing the party of seeking ‘to turn the country into a fulminating street protest [piazza], which shouts, rants, condemns’. While Berlusconi pointed to the failings of the ‘old political class’, he smoothed over the specifics of Bribesville, instead collapsing it into the trip-tych of ‘criminality, corruption and drugs’ and the high public debt run up in recent years. The problem, it seemed, was not the actual parties of government, but rather ‘politics’ as such, from ‘the Left’ to the ‘prophets and saviours’ whom the trials had brought to the surface. What could, however, ‘make the state work’ was a businessman of broad experience. Given this enthusiasm for putting business values into politics, it was no surprise that his candidates in 1994 were dominated by employees of his Fininvest and Publitalia companies.
This regeneration of the right would have been impossible without Berlusconi’s pre-existing political ties. Indeed, his media power, rooted in privatisations that had begun in the late 1970s, also owed specifically to his association with the corrupt Socialist prime minister Craxi. Under the First Republic, the public broadcaster RAI had held a monopoly on national television, but this was chipped away over the 1970s with the granting of licenses to supposedly ‘local’ stations like Berlusconi’s Telemilano, which, in reality, broadcast nationally. Already by 1983, his channels sold more ad space than the RAI, and after a legal challenge in 1984–85, Craxi issued the so-called decreti Berlusconi to put a formal end to the monopoly. Where RAI was governed by the demands of public-service broadcasting, the tycoon’s stations instead served up a diet of escapism, promoting the sovereignty of the consumer and a Gordon Gekko–style image of success. The tacky glamour promoted by prime-time chat and US soaps was allied to the carefree materialism of the game show. Some, like comedian Beppe Grillo (cast out by RAI after his trashing of Craxi), refused to appear on the billionaire’s channels. But Berlusconi had a platform to address tens of millions.
In this sense, it soon became clear that the judicial offensive against ‘the parties’ had opened the way to powerful and well-structured forces even less democratic than their First Republic predecessors. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia vehicle – a creation of his media empire in which he personally picked the candidates – had neither local branches, members, party congresses or internal elections. In the 1994 general election it was also allied to other radical forces, from Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord to Gianfranco Fini’s MSI (now rebadged Alleanza Nazionale, National Alliance; AN). These parties like Berlusconi each vaunted their credentials as ‘outsiders’ who stood against the political legacy of the First Republic. Yet, in truth, they merely represented different souls of the Right. While Berlusconi’s televised address had augured a Thatcher-style revolution in Italy (‘liberal in politics, free-marketeer in economics’), this stood at odds with the more paternalist hues of the AN and small centrist forces; the Lega Nord, based in the heartlands of the wartime Resistance, in turn refused to enter any direct alliance with the postfascists.
Berlusconi’s coalition soon took a lead in the polls – trashing any hopes that Clean Hands might have paved the centre-left’s own path to high office. And the result of the March 1994 election was the destruction of the parties that had ruled Italy since World War II. The right-wing coalitions built around Forza Italia amassed some 16.6 million votes, as the candidates of Berlusconi, Bossi, and Fini drew almost 43 per cent support. This was a massive blow for the PDS, whose Alliance of Progressives scored just 13.3 million votes (34 per cent); the surviving trunks of the old DC, a party that had been the largest party of government without interruption from 1944 to 1992, won the backing of only 6.1 million Italians, less than 16 per cent of the total. Aside from the sheer speed of the new right’s breakthrough, the result was also remarkable for the distribution of seats. Held under the new electoral law11 passed by referendum in April 1993 – with 75 per cent of seats assigned on the basis of first-past-the-post – the March 1994 contest made the Lega the largest single party in the Chamber of Deputies and gave Berlusconi and his allies a hundred-seat majority, though they fell marginally short in the Senate.
Rehabilitating the Far Right
Such a rapid electoral triumph was impressive for a man who claimed that he had ‘never wanted to enter politics’. Indeed, this claim pointed not only to Berlusconi’s ‘outsider’ status, but also his opportunism in entering the public arena. From the start of his reign, it was obvious that he had sought high office in order to shield himself from fraud and racketeering charges, both exploiting the political chaos created by Clean Hands and trying to protect himself from it. The Biondi bill of July 1994 – a bid to put an end to Clean Hands, ultimately felled by the Lega (after some equivocation) – was a first, failed, example of the ad personam legislation that Berlusconi used to shield himself and his underlings from prosecution. Where the old parties’ local sections, internal elections, and congresses had been polluted by conflicts of interest, Forza Italia was overtly a web of business associates personally dependent on Berlusconi’s empire. At the same time, while the tycoon took his distance from the mass parties of the First Republic, he also took sharply different attitudes to the two forces that had been excluded from high office – the Communists and the neofascists.
When Berlusconi heralded the end of the Cold War as the triumph of liberal values, this looked a lot like a shift to the right, indeed a throwback to a previous age of anti-communism. Indeed, whereas he characterised his own right-wing coalition as ‘liberal and Christian’, anyone who opposed it was labelled a ‘communist’. The neofascist MSI had long claimed that the state, the universities, and public television were overrun with Communists; this same myth was now used by Berlusconi to smear anyone who challenged his interests. For the billionaire, the PDS, the magistrates, and his critics at The Economist were part of one same ‘Red’ establishment: he even labelled this weekly spigot of free-marketeer liberalism The Ecommunist. Curiously, the dissolution of the actually existing Communist Party allowed Berlusconi to apply this label all the more indiscriminately. In 2003, he staged a photo op brandishing a fifty-year-old copy of l’Unità with the headline ‘Stalin Is Dead’, cocking a snook at the supposedly ‘real’ sympathies of his opponents.
Berlusconi’s crude re-assertion of anti-communism was also the basis for the rehabilitation of the far right, the ‘post-fascists’ who joined his so-called Pole of Good Government. As the 1960 attempt to create a Christian-Democratic government reliant on neofascist parliamentary support had shown, the cordon sanitaire against the MSI had never been a direct product of the ban on the
