Silvio Berlusconi

A study in failure

James L. Newell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526133953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about one of the most remarkable European politicians of recent decades, Silvio Berlusconi, and about his contribution to the dramatic changes that have overtaken Italian politics since the early 1990s. From the vantage point of 2017, would Italian political history of the past twenty-five years look substantially different had Berlusconi not had the high-profile role in it that he did? Asking the question makes it possible to contribute to a broader debate of recent years concerning the significance of leaders in post-Cold War democratic politics. Having considered Berlusconi's legacy in the areas of political culture, voting and party politics, public policy and the quality of Italian democracy, the book concludes by considering the international significance of the Berlusconi phenomenon in relation to the recent election of Donald Trump, with whom Berlusconi is often compared.

Part I

Emergence

1

From childhood, through business career to political debut, 1936–93

In this chapter we describe the succession of events that were responsible for the emergence of Berlusconi as a public figure, focusing on his business career and the growth of his commercial empire. The narrative leaves one with the strong impression that his career (like those of most people, we may suppose) was marked by significant elements of path dependency – the inertia that keeps phenomena in existence, long after the factors that initially brought them into being have ceased to exist. Having, for instance, succeeded in establishing a dominant position in the field of commercial television, that dominance would continue and grow thanks to self-generating processes having to do with the capacity to attract advertising revenue and therefore to finance the programmes that would attract large audiences and so forth. This leads to the conclusion, when viewing his business career as a whole, that while his role was fundamentally that of a man who was ‘eventful’, he was, at certain turns, ‘event making’, to use the terminology introduced in the Introduction. This is suggested by those occasions on which he was able to turn misfortunes into advantages, as we shall see.

In this chapter we describe the events of Berlusconi’s life against the background of the social, economic and political changes that were taking place at the time: in some cases these developments were directly reflected in the entrepreneur’s activities and therefore help us to understand them; in other cases they were directly responsible for the career opportunities Berlusconi took. We begin with a description of his childhood and youth before describing his initial business forays and how these led to increasingly ambitious building projects and thus to the establishment of his media empire. We then go on to describe how, once it had been established, the empire was able to grow even larger thanks to his relationship with national-level politicians and especially the Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi. We complete the account with a description of the most significant of the remaining business ventures and of how these and Berlusconi’s relationships with the world of politics led to some of the earliest of his encounters with the judicial authorities.

Childhood and youth, 1936–61

The world of Berlusconi’s early childhood was one of hardship – but also of aspiration. He was born on Tuesday 29 September 1936 in via Volturno, in a district of Milan known as l’Isola or ‘the Island’, a name which may have come from the neighbourhood’s relative isolation thanks to the construction of a railway that cut off former points of access from other areas nearby. Situated about two and half kilometres to the north of the city centre, l’Isola was a district whose blocks of flats marked it out as predominantly working-class – suggesting that Berlusconi’s family was somewhat better off than its neighbours; his 28-year-old father, Luigi, was a functionary of the Banca Rasini, one of the tiny financial institutions that to this day give to the Italian banking system its characteristically fragmented and localised structure. His 25-year-old mother, Rosa, was a housewife, as the vast majority of married women were at this time, so completing the profile of a family that a number of the Italian-language biographies (e.g. Ruggeri and Guarino, 1994: 21) of the entrepreneur describe as typical of the Milanese lower middle class.

As such it is likely that the Berlusconi household’s income was round about 450 lire per month, giving it about one-and-a-half times the income of the average manual household at the time. As he progressed in his career at the bank Luigi would have been able to come increasingly close to realising the dream immortalised in the famous song of 1939, Mille lire al mese (‘A thousand lire a month’) – a song that expressed the aspirations of white-collar Italians everywhere to a salary which (though amounting to no more than about €860 today) would at the time have conferred status and some escape from generalised relative hardship: average Italian wages were about half of those in France, a third of those in Britain and a quarter of those in the US. The average Italian consumed a third as much meat and milk as his or her British or American counterpart and considered coffee, tea and sugar to be luxury items. There was a car, a telephone and a radio for every 100, 70 and 40 inhabitants respectively, while the corresponding numbers for Britain were 20, 13 and 6 (Chiarini, n.d.).

The hardships of Berlusconi’s early childhood were compounded by the events of the war. Luigi served as a simple foot soldier, while his family moved to a small village near the Swiss border, Oltrona di San Mamette. In an interview given to journalist Steffano Lorenzetto in 2006, Rosa recalled how, pregnant for the second time, she was obliged each day to walk to and from Fino Mornasco, three kilometres away, to catch the train to Milan to work as a secretary for Pirelli (Lorenzetto, 2006). In July 1943 the Allies had invaded Sicily, Mussolini had been deposed and Hitler, suspicious of a possible Italian defection, had poured German troops into Italy from the north. On 3 September the Italian government had signed with the Allies a secret armistice which, when announced on 8 September, had led to the disintegration of the Italian army, left with no orders other than to cease hostilities against Anglo-American forces and to resist attacks from whatever other quarter. The Germans, in reaction, had occupied the entire peninsula and on 12 September snatched Mussolini from prison; under pressure from his rescuers, he agreed to set up a new fascist state in the north of Italy. On 15 September Mussolini ordered all Italian troops, on pain of being referred to the War Tribunal, to report to the nearest German command post. Under these circumstances, an illegal crossing of the Swiss frontier seemed to be the only option. Luigi escaped to Switzerland, where he was held in an internment camp until July 1945 (Fiori, 1995: 19–20).

If the family’s income initially had to support three people, from 1943, when Berlusconi was 7, and from 1949, when he was 13, it had to support four and five people respectively; the former year saw the birth of his sister Maria Antonietta, the latter the birth of his brother Paolo. The consequent economic limitations to which the family was subject seem to have been reflected by the arrangements made for Berlusconi’s education from the year before Paolo’s arrival; he was entrusted to a local boarding school, Sant’Ambrogio, run by the Salesian Fathers as an alternative to the Swiss college to which a more florid Milanese family of the petit bourgeoisie would otherwise have aspired. And in his final year he was apparently obliged to relinquish his status as a boarder and become a day pupil because of the difficulty his father was having in paying the fees (Ruggeri and Guarino, 1994: 23).

At Sant’Ambrogio, Berlusconi performed well academically, and according to a former classmate was wont to help his weaker companions by doing their homework for them. In exchange, he would demand payments of 20 or 50 lire and, in an early application of the marketing strategy soddisfatti o riborsati (satisfied or reimbursed), return the money if the work failed to achieve a pass grade (Stille, 2010: 32–3; Fiori, 1995: 22). The future entrepreneur’s behaviour seemed to reflect both the firm discipline of the boarding school and the sense of opportunity of the world beyond it. The war was now over. If, in its immediate aftermath, cities lay in ruins, if the railways and the road network were unserviceable, if there were shortages of basic consumer goods, then paradoxically, these very facts meant that the situation was rich with entrepreneurial possibilities. Together with the Marshall Plan of 1947 and then the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 they laid the foundations for the later ‘economic miracle’ whose first signs began to make themselves felt from the early 1950s: from 1951 to 1962 the Italian economy grew at an average annual rate of 5.3 per cent, as compared to 3.9 per cent for the US and 2.8 per cent for the UK.

The recollections of childhood acquaintances depict the young Berlusconi as a self-confident person, one who loved to perform. It was an inclination he was able to exploit for practical purposes after he graduated from Sant’Ambrogio and enrolled in the Law Faculty at the University of Milan: short of money, his father asked him to finance his studies himself, which he duly did by playing in a band with his childhood friend and future president of Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri; by working as a door-to-door salesman; and by spending his summers acting as an entertainer on board cruise ships (Fiori, 1995: 26; Ruggeri and Guarino, 1994: 24).

Again, Berlusconi’s activity seemed to encapsulate broader cultural trends, l’arte di arrangiarsi (‘the art of getting by’) being one that immediately leaps to mind: the title of a 1955 film staring the comic Alberto Sordi, the phrase is used by Italians in everyday parlance to refer to perceived national character traits not at all unlike those the British have in mind when they refer to the so-called ‘Dunkirk spirit’. Essentially, it refers to the art of overcoming adversity and turning it to one’s advantage by employing creativity and enterprise, qualities that have enabled Italians to survive war, terrorism, corruption and economic crisis. Negatively, it can involve opportunism and an indifference to rules or principles; positively, it denotes innovation and originality (Diamanti, 2009). The film covers a period of several decades during which the Sicilian Sasa Scimoni ‘must adapt to the various power structures in Italy. Whether it be the monarchy, the socialists, the fascists or the Church, Scimoni manages not only to acclimate himself to the prevailing winds, but also turn a neat financial profit in the bargain’ (New York Times, n.d.).

La dolce vita (‘the sweet life’) is another phrase that springs to mind. The title of a film written and directed by Federico Fellini which came out the year before Berlusconi graduated (1961), the phrase is used in common parlance to refer to a relaxed, luxurious lifestyle and therefore also to the period from the end of the 1950s to the late 1960s, years of prosperity and optimism. The film ‘portrays the eccentric night life of would-be actors, impoverished aristocrats, playboys and dandies, fashionable intellectuals, and ever ready paparazzi’ at a time when the economic miracle and the flow of consumer goods was challenging traditional values and making possible more colourful lifestyles.¹ Berlusconi’s cruise-ship voyages, the high-quality clothes that went with them and his legendary abilities to charm members of the opposite sex all seem to capture the spirit of the time in exactly the same way that the film does.

First forays into business

Not only was the economic miracle reflected in Berlusconi’s activity but it also provided him with his first major business opportunity, thanks to what it did to the demand for housing and other construction. People whose incomes doubled between 1952 and 1963 had more children and needed larger houses; many began to look for hotels by the sea; the wealthier sought second homes. Added to this were the effects of the internal migrations brought on by the concentration of the boom in the north of Italy, as was to be expected: more industrialised than the south, it enjoyed better infrastructural resources, such as a good transportation system, and it was closer to northern European export markets. Therefore, when the post-war boom in international trade created new business opportunities it was far more likely that enterprise start-ups would be located there than in the south. This would in turn influence subsequent location decisions in a self-generating process, not very successfully countered by the government’s efforts to develop the south through the Cassa per il mezzogiorno (‘Fund for the south’). Meanwhile, the economic miracle brought with it television and cars – generating awareness of new possibilities in other regions along with greater geographical mobility – as well as better access to basic education, and therefore more of the cultural resources necessary to realise the new possibilities. Thus it was that the period of post-war growth triggered massive flows of internal migration: involving over nine million people between 1955 and 1970, at its height between 1960 and 1963 this saw about 800,000 people a year migrate from the south to the north. ‘In Milan alone, the centre of the boom, 260,000 families arrived in the space of a decade, the equivalent to the addition of a city of 600,000 inhabitants’ (Fiori, 1995: 28, my translation).

This in turn triggered what journalists and other writers would call ‘il Far West edilizio’ an expression intended to highlight the uncontrolled and indiscriminate nature of the massive construction boom that ensued. On the one hand, new arrivals in the northern cities often found that the initial shortage of affordable housing condemned them to squalid living conditions in large dormitory towns in the suburbs from which they longed to escape. On the other hand, local authorities struggled to provide the schools, hospitals and other facilities needed to enable them to cope with the sudden massive influx of people. Above all, they lacked town-planning legislation adequate to deal with a phenomenon that had no precedents, or with the vast numbers of holders of agricultural land now desperate to transfer it to builders knowing that a change of designation would increase its value many times over.

During his final year at university Berlusconi had worked for a building firm, Immobiliare costruzioni, as an assistant to its owner. He had also won 2,000,000 lire: a prize offered by the advertising agency, Manzoni, for the best degree thesis on the topic of commercials. It was a considerable sum, the equivalent of about €50,000 today. With this and his law degree he now sought an associate with whom to buy, in via Alciati, about five kilometres to the west of the city centre, a piece of land on which he would build an apartment block. Through his father and his father’s employer, Carlo Rasini, he was put in touch with a builder, Pietro Canali, a client of the Banca Rasini which provided the surety needed for the acquisition: while the land cost 190 million lire, then from his prize, his savings and his father, Berlusconi was able to put together no more than ten million. The costs of the building work, meanwhile, were met by taking advantage of the heavy demand and selling the apartments before they were built: purchasers would pay a deposit when signing the contract of sale and the rest as the work progressed.

Near disaster: Brugherio

In 1963 Berlusconi moved on to an altogether more ambitious project, the construction of an entire residential quarter for four thousand inhabitants. Brugherio, 14 kilometres to the north-east of Milan, was the location; Edilnord the company he established to realise the project, together with Canali, Rasini, Eduardo Piccitto (an accountant) and the builders Enrico and Giovanni Botta. Some of the resources needed to finance the project came from the partners, but the vast bulk of it was supplied by Renzo Rezzonico representing the Swiss finance company Finanzierungesellschaft für Residenzen Ag, which was alleged to act as a vehicle for the money-laundering activities of the Mafia (Ruggieri and Guarino, 1994: 39–40).

Carlo Rasini was sceptical of the project from the beginning given that Brugherio was dominated by chemical and industrial plants, far from shops and isolated from surrounding areas. Alexander Stille (2010: 35–8) argues that Berlusconi’s own anecdotes, describing how he managed to save the project from collapse, are revealing of his business methods. The entrepreneur decided to try to persuade one of the national pension funds to invest in the project and through the managing director of Manzoni was put in touch with the vice-president of the acquisitions committee of a large fund whom he persuaded to visit the building site. He then arranged that at the moment of the visit a large number of his relatives would be present, pretending to be potential purchasers; however, the pretence was exposed when a rather stupid cousin arrived and started greeting and hugging all the assembled relatives. Not discouraged by this setback, Berlusconi, through a friend in Rome, was put in touch with the vice-president’s secretary with whom he ingratiated himself and whom he persuaded to telephone him the next time the vice-president was due to make a trip to Milan. Tipped off about a forthcoming visit he rushed to Rome and got a seat on the train opposite the vice-president. Deploying all his charm, he managed to persuade the vice-president, by getting him half drunk and establishing a ‘common cultural link’ thanks to a conversation about the genitals of women from the Caucasus, that Brugherio represented a good investment.

Stille observes that the put-on with Berlusconi’s relatives was simply fraudulent. Though claiming to have relied solely on his determination rather than on favours of any kind, Berlusconi describes, in somewhat vulgar terms, how he exploited the acquaintance of a friend in Rome to seduce a secretary in order be alone with a man whom he could use to help him out of a fix. Though claiming to be an exponent of the free market, he used personal connections and other questionable means to persuade an important pension fund to acquire apartments in a squalid area of Milan that no one else wanted to buy.

Whatever the truth of the anecdotes, they are, it can be argued, revealing of what Berlusconi’s ...