Berlusconi Both Drew and Divided Italians

And polarized it. “No one had ever so divided Italy and Italians,” wrote Massimo Gramellini, a columnist for the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa.

His resignation on Saturday after 17 years as the paramount figure in Italian politics, just over half of them as prime minister, does not erase his presence from the political stage. He still has a powerful political party, now fighting for its future, and owns Italy’s largest private broadcaster. But it marks the symbolic end of an era in which the media baron held the country under his spell.

A businessman who built a real estate and media empire, Mr. Berlusconi was first elected in 1994, casting himself as a modernizer and promising Italy a season of free-market reform. But after a career barely dented by colorful sex scandals and multiple corruption trials, it was the market that finally drove him from office, when Europe’s debt crisis hit Italy.

From the start, Mr. Berlusconi entwined his fate with Italy’s. By personalizing Italian politics and turning himself into a brand — self-made, virile and wily — he transformed Italy’s political and institutional cultures in ways that will resonate for years.

In recent years, it was the sex scandals that most dominated the headlines, as reports emerged from judicial investigations of tawdry parties at the prime minister’s private homes involving scores of young women and even a prostitute who went by the stage name Ruby Heartstealer. (He faces charges of paying for sex with a minor, although they both deny the sex, and abusing his office by helping release her from police custody when she was arrested for theft.)

“He legitimized and made normal a kind of behavior, a style of illegality that in other countries would not even be tolerated in small doses,” said Paolo Flores d’Arcais, a philosopher and editor of the left-wing monthly magazine MicroMega. “And he inverted everything so that those who criticized him were considered moralists. It’s the world turned upside down.”

Mr. Berlusconi entered politics in the wake of a bribery scandal that had brought down Italy’s postwar political order, where for decades a centrist Catholic party was pitted against Westernized Communists. In a 1994 televised address, unprecedented in Italy’s staid political culture, he promised a new world, and invited Italians to join him.

“I have decided to enter the playing field and to take up politics because I don’t want to live in country that is not free, governed by immature political forces and by men who are bound hand and foot to a past that was both a political and economic failure,” he said.

Alexander Stille, the author of a book on Mr. Berlusconi called “The Sack of Rome,” said he represented something new. “The old political parties, the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party, represented broad ideologies and their leaders were comparatively unimportant,” he said. “Berlusconi, already a celebrity, offered himself: no real ideology other than his own personal wealth.”

It was a brilliant strategy, and it catapulted him into power. But his first term lasted only eight months, crashing when he lost a coalition ally. Mr. Berlusconi led the opposition for the rest of the 1990s, when a series of technocratic and center-left governments brought Italy into the single European currency.

He was elected again in 2001, after delivering a magazine-sized volume, “An Italian Story,” to every doorstep in Italy. A masterpiece of self-branding, it depicted him as a self-made businessman, a family man and a ladies’ man. With a dash of populism, it listed his horoscope (a Libra, “he is a communicative person capable of strong passion and deep love”) and showcased his love of soccer. He had named his party Forza Italia, or “Go, Italy,” after a soccer cheer.

Italians admired his image of wealth and sexual prowess. “The average Italian saw himself as Berlusconi, only poorer,” wrote Mr. Gramellini, the columnist.

That image was cemented into Italy’s psyche, and rarely challenged, in the media he controlled. His broadcasting company, Mediaset, shook up Italian television starting in the 1980s by importing flashy American soap operas and dramas and producing new programs featuring scantily-clad dancing girls, draining audiences from the staid state broadcaster.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/world/europe/berlusconi-both-drew-and-divided-italians.html?partner=rss&emc=rss