Down in Piazza del Popolo, the Scots didn’t know what hit them. There were half a dozen of them, in full regalia kilts and tam o’shanters, here for the Italy versus Scotland rugby match. Half the country was here, marauding through the statuary like Visigoths returning to sack the place afresh.
But it was the day of violet in the piazza, an assembly of the anti-Berlusconi forces across the nation. They were all draped in light purple, and above them fluttered a thousand hammer and sickles, courtesy of communist rifondazione, the still very much in business communist left.
The Scots gaped. Was this 1971? Was this all a dream? Had they drunk that much? They beat a hasty retreat. They thought they were hard enough, but they hadn’t counted on commies. Later, in the rugby, Italy beat their ass.
The encounter serves as a reminder, if one were needed, of the sheer difference of Italy. Greece is strange enough, but it is as much a Middle Eastern country as a European one, despite the attempts by its fascist right to claim direct descent from Aristotle.
Italy is right in the centre of the West, more or less is it. Yet its politics is strange, circular and inverted, a spiralling Dantesque descent of conspiracy. Conspiracy and violence. And, if you’re from the left, theory. Lots and lots of theory.
And like the obscure struggle that gave Dante his raw material to portray the cosmic battle of good and evil, Italian politics became the battle of two titans, Marxism and Christian democracy, labour and capital, man bites god. Nothing was more hard fought, embedded, as layered as the Sistine ceiling as Italian politics.
And then in 1994, it all flaked and fell about their heads.
How does one begin to explain Silvio Berlusconi floating over Italy like a giant inflatable pig this past decade and a half? To say that it is as if Rupert Murdoch had become prime minister.
It is as if Murdoch, Kerry Stokes and James Packer were one person, who was PM. With his own political party, the Australian Electoral Commission, and a chunk of the ABC.
Berlusconi’s dodgy practices have piled up corruption allegations metres deep, yet most have had no effect due to the statue of limitations he himself has set.
Now imagine he has been in your head for 15 years.
These days Berlusconi is widely seen as being on the way out, though no one would hazard a guess as to when he’ll wind up. Some optimistic souls believed he would be hung out to dry by “Millsgate“, the tax-evasion scandal drawing in the husband of the former home secretary of the UK, an affair that has given Italians a window into scandal British-style ( “He quit? Because the government paid to get his moat cleaned? Scusi?”). But he appears to have slipped out of that one, too.
The melancholy truth is that at the moment, the left can’t get a drop on him.
“They keep insisting on truth, the left,” says one editor of a small radical magazine.
“They want it to always be a juridical process. That’s only one process of truth, and not the ones Italians are most interested in.”
Indeed, Berlusconi has wrong footed the left as surely as one of the players in the football teams he owns (did I mention the football team?). His first party, Forza Italia, sounded like a football team.
The next one, People of Liberty, created by combining Forza Italia with a post-fascist party, sounds like a ’70s mor pop group. Berlusconi is agile and spectacular where his opponents are solemn and portentous. A TV mogul, he has essentially imported the principle of variety TV — the whole is nothing, the part everything — into a politics that was hitherto about the way in which everything formed part of larger and larger structures.
That can backfire, of course. The joke of the week here is that Berlusconi’s party is out of the upcoming regional elections in Rome because his party missed the nomination deadline by 15 minutes.
But that may add to his charm. And he will get around it anyway.
The Scots looked bewildered among the crowds of the left last Sunday.
But it must be said that the left look lost among their own country at the moment.
It’s a “statute” of limitations, not a “statue” of limitations.
They brought a donkey to a rugby match?
Please – more Rundle in Rome. We have lived here for two years and this is the best piece of writing on Italian politics I have read.
I think Berlusconi is there because of the political vacuum. The Communist Party has shrunk and fragmented. Without the Communist threat to justify them, the Christian Democrats were exposed as the corrupt Mafia-ridden front they always were. Until a new party system stabilises showmen like Berlusconi have the floor.
What? No FC harrumphing on Guy’s inadequate undesrtanding of Life, the Universe & Everything?
Churchill’s comment on Russia applies to italy, if one could be bothered. The best example they gave the world in the 80s was the several, extended periods, WITHOUT government when the real people trundled along perfectly. Could be a lesson there.