Quotes of the Day
Silvio Berlusconi likes to think big. At an emergency European Union meeting last year, held to draw up a response to Israel's siege of Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound, the Italian Prime Minister had other things on his mind. "I have a solution to the vision of Europe," said Berlusconi, who had just returned from Moscow after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "We must make Russia a member of the E.U." The foreign ministers in the room were flabbergasted, according to a diplomat who was there, not only because Berlusconi was ignoring the issue at hand, but because he didn't seem to know that Russia wouldn't qualify for E.U. membership for decades. "Everybody thought it was like he'd never been exposed to real politics before," the diplomat says. "People couldn't take him seriously."
Starting this week, Europe will have plenty of new chances to take him seriously. As the media tycoon turned Prime Minister assumes the E.U.'s rotating six-month presidency, his brand of brash, simple, big- picture politics will reach a continent-wide audience. He takes center stage at a crucial juncture in the Union's history: 10 countries are set to join next year, the details of the new constitution must be hammered out and the E.U.'s tattered relations with the United States need patching up. Is Berlusconi — who has a self-confessed "major superiority complex" — the man to get the job done?
Diplomats worry that his headstrong style and taste for ad-lib ("We must be aware of the superiority of [Western] civilization" he said after 9/11) will kick up dust. And some influential academics even question whether, thanks to Berlusconi, Italy itself would qualify for E.U. membership if it were applying today. The E.U. requirement that a candidate country have a free media is arguably not being met by Italy, says Paul Ginsborg, a professor of contemporary European history at the University of Florence, since Berlusconi — Italy's richest man, with an estimated worth of over €5.1 billion — owns virtually all of the country's commercial television outlets. And the independence of the Italian judiciary is also under attack, thanks to a string of tailor-made laws passed by the Italian legislature to protect Berlusconi from a bribery prosecution that he says is politically motivated. These laws were capped in June by an immunity bill that stopped the trial against him dead in his tracks — guaranteeing that his time as E.U. president won't be sullied by a verdict.
Berlusconi has spent the two years since taking office preparing for his E.U. role by stuffing his own legal problems into a closet and slamming the door. But his conflict-of-interest problem remains, as even one supporter admits, "as big as a house." The Prime Minister is also the country's leading publisher, advertiser and a major player in the financial and insurance sectors. His three Mediaset channels account for more than 90% of the national commercial TV market, and he exerts a powerful sway over state broadcaster RAI. Last April he publicly called for the sacking of three left-leaning talk-show hosts — and they were duly fired. "Italy risks sliding into a regime without realizing it," warns opposition leader Francesco Rutelli.
Despite the criticisms, Berlusconi has become the Prime Minister with the tightest grip on power in postwar Italian history. His approval ratings remain high. Success in politics, he says, requires the same key skill as success in business: salesmanship. "He is who he is," says Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi confidant and editor of the conservative daily Il Foglio. "Berlusconi is an outsider, the Milanese businessman who became Prime Minister. That's it." Throughout his storybook life — singing for tips on a cruise ship in his teens, making his first million in real estate in his 30s, launching a media empire that helped push him into the Forbes Top 50, and now, at 66, the most loved and loathed leader since World War II — this son of a salaried bank manager has shown a knack for knowing what people want.
At a private ceremony last year, Berlusconi summarized his approach to a group of young men and women who had just passed the grueling civil service exam that qualified them for the Italian diplomatic corps. Instead of briefing the budding diplomats on the subtleties of international relations, the billionaire leader addressed them as a potential new sales force. "Present yourself well," he said, according to someone who was there: firm handshakes, no sweaty palms and don't get caught with bad breath. Berlusconi's salesman's touch has served him well over the past 10 years. The television baron was a novelty when he entered politics in 1993, but he got elected by adapting American campaign tactics — colorful party conventions and slick campaign slogans — to an Italian audience. It didn't hurt that he controlled three television stations, a daily newspaper and several weekly magazines that were covering the election. But media savvy didn't help him in office, and he was written off the following year when his first shot at the premiership ended after only seven months, when his coalition unraveled following a judicial probe into his business dealings. Then Berlusconi made his stunning comeback — and, in the process, gave a thorough makeover to an Italian political system once run by faceless leaders and cautious backroom pols.
He turned to the same techniques he'd used to create Italy's first commercial television network: he took surveys, honed his product, lined up and trained attractive candidates and even sent out "campaign kits" to each new recruit — including the same handshake and hygiene hints he confided to the group of young diplomats. He was the first Italian politician to understand that television performance is a key to victory. "When you go on TV you are entering people's homes; you're not going to the football stadium," says Giuliano Urbani, Italy's Culture Minister and a founding member of Berlusconi's Forza Italia Party. "You need to dress appropriately, behave in a certain way and speak directly." Berlusconi's product is himself — and Italians seem happy to buy it. The international press has portrayed Berlusconi as something of a reality TV show gone awry. But the Prime Minister is a formidable character — and Ginsborg at the University of Florence warns that his rise should not be written off as a purely Italian phenomenon. Ginsborg says the tycoon leader is the symptom of a larger political problem posed by a shrinking pool of media outlets: too much power and control in too few hands.
"Since 1989," Ginsborg argues, "there has been an unprecedented personalization of politics and concentration of economic and media power in Europe. Berlusconi is just the most highly developed form of this." In London, David Puttnam, a film producer and friend of Tony Blair's, warned in the House of Lords that "we certainly do not want the Berlusconi-ization of British politics." Mario Segni, a conservative Italian M.E.P. and Berlusconi opponent, has introduced a bill to limit media concentration in the E.U. "Berlusconi poses a new question to Europe and the world," Segni says. "Can you have democracy without rules that protect the pluralism of information?"
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Control of the Italian media, in any case, won't help Berlusconi conquer the E.U. His government will be sounding out the other members to find compromise on the knottiest parts of the new constitution. Smaller states are keen to see more real power centered in Brussels, while some of the larger ones — notably the U.K. — vow to block that. The Italian government's own stance is ambivalent, with good reason: Italy's traditionally strong support of Brussels has to be balanced with the euroscepticism of his coalition members in the Northern League.
Above all, the ever-ambitious Italian leader wants Rome to be the birthplace of the "New Europe." Berlusconi will try to secure Rome as the site for the signing of the E.U.'s new constitution in 2004. Such a ceremony would provide the kind of coup de théâtre that marks him as a statesman to voters at home. But it would also make for a touch of historical symmetry, since the E.U. traces its origins to the 1957 Treaty of Rome that established the European Community.
All this may be hard to achieve, given the prickly relationship Berlusconi has with French President Jacques Chirac. In the middle of Chirac's speech at the G8 meeting last year in Canada, Berlusconi stood up and started handing out watches as gifts to the other leaders, a delicious political snub. The two wily politicians seem bound to mix it up whenever they meet. Lately, though, Berlusconi seems to be getting the better of Chirac. When Berlusconi shunned Arafat during a Middle East visit last month, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin complained that he "did not respect the European line." The Italian responded by saying that France "had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" — precisely the incendiary words Chirac used against the "New Europe" countries that had voiced their support for the U.S. policy on Iraq in February. E.U. diplomats are looking forward to seeing whether Berlusconi and Chirac will find new ways to head-butt.
It's difficult for any single leader to dramatically influence E.U. policies during the brief presidency. So one senior European diplomat figures Berlusconi will approach the next six months as a sort of publicity tour. "It will be the best choreographed semester," the diplomat predicts. "Lots of glitz." A little substance might help too, but then that wouldn't make for such well-packaged prime-time viewing.
- JEFF ISRAELY | Rome
- After jamming his scandals into a closet, Italy's tycoon PM takes over the E.U. presidency