The End of Berlusconi and the Future of Italy
Why the Solution to Rome's Woes is Simple but Terrible
Article Summary and Author Biography
For nearly two decades Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi inspired voters with his enthusiasm, but he brought no reform to Italy. Now his likely successor and the European Central Bank are setting out with a host of reforms, but have no enthusiasm to get them passed.
GIANNI RIOTTA is a columnist for La Stampa and teaches new media at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of The Things I Learned (Le Cose Che Ho Imparato).
Snapshot
To outsiders, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi may appear to be an Italian extravagance. But behind the political and sexual scandals hides a history of moral malaise.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is on the way out, the story goes. Come Monday, his center-right coalition, which has dominated Italian politics for nearly 20 years, will be a thing of the past, and Italy will be spared the wrath of the European debt crisis. The opposition thinks it is time to uncork the prosecco.
But it is not. Italy is far from fixed.
Berlusconi first walked the magnificent halls of the Palazzo Chigi -- the palatial prime minister's residence -- in 1994, when he was a media tycoon, football entrepreneur, a bon vivant, a billionaire, and all of a sudden founder of a political party, Forza Italia. Sophisticated analysts spurned the new party, but for two decades Forza Italia locked in the support of at least a third of the Italian electorate. It won three national elections. And over the years, Berlusconi lined up tens of thousands of political operatives to run the country's major regions and cities, from Lombardy to Sicily and from Milan to Rome.
Voters were captivated by Berlusconi's anti-establishment war cry: "I am a self-made man, not a politician!" They loved his unbridled optimism, his populist style. However, although the prime minister railed against the status quo in his speeches, he failed to reform Italy's stilted economy. He never touched the fat cats -- the tax dodgers, the clubby entrepreneurs who spurned innovation, the class of lobbyists always tied up in shady deals -- or the way they divided public money and assets with little regard for merit and productivity, but instead according to their old web of family and friends. He frequently clashed with the country's powerful unions but never managed to energize the country's sluggish labor market...
