“Some of my friends were on the phone about the list thing, and they were laughing so hard they couldn’t speak.”

Emilio is laughing hard himself, as we walk along the elegant stone arcades of Padua, where he teaches at the university, part of the legion of the left to transfer into Italian institutions, after decades of hard-fought struggle, and not a little persecution.

“You know,” he says, ushering us into a gelateria, “it was a rare fun moment.”

The list affair has captivated Italy, a country which sets the bar pretty high as far as attention-grabbing political farce goes. Several days ago, nominations were due for the elections for 13 of 20 regional assemblies, due to take place at the end of March.

In Lazio, the region which includes Rome, the hapless goon charged with getting in the forms for Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘People of Liberty’ group – one Alfredo Milione – initially arrived too early to submit the forms, went out and came back fifteen minutes too late.

His reasons for doing this are still mysterious. His first excuse was that he went out for a panini, the second that there was a problem with his young daughter. Having thus attempted to appeal to the two great Italian passions – family and sandwiches – he crumpled under the weight of his contradictions. With the third element – capricious and infuriating bureaucracy – drawn in, the petit-portrait of the country was complete.

Of course it didn’t stop there. Berlusconi candidates were also excluded in Lombardy, the second-most important region, home of Milan, and a PDL stronghold. The candidate there was Nicole Minetti – jurist? Trade unionist? Pillar of the community? No, oral hygienist, who had treated Berlusconi when he was assaulted in Milan last year. Good luck in Italy is expressed as “in bocca al lupo”, in the mouth of the wolf, and so it proved for Minetti who was launched into national politics.

Still, oral hygienist, that’s an actual job right? Berlusconi tends to prefer showgirls.

Oh, yeah. Minetti also worked as a showgirl.

The PDL list was excluded in Lombardy because 300 of the 5000 signatures required were found to be dodgy. The list is staying out, for the moment. The Lazio/Rome list has been permitted back in by an appeals court, though Berlusconi’s claims that the Radical Party had caused the crisis by ‘jostling’ his representative, Mr Millions, as he tried to submit the forms was widely laughed off. The Radical Party had been instrumental in uncovering the signatures scam in Lombardy, so Berlusconi was peeved. And embarrassed by the chaos within his own party, whose tardiness in submitting the forms was probably due to last-minute wrangling.

“Even if they let them back in,” Emilio had said, before the court’s decision came down. It won’t be good for PDL. “Even Fini is pissed off because these fascists, you know, they like discipline.’

The Fini in question (pronounced Feeney, no not that one) actually is a fascist, or an ex-one. Gianfranco Fini was formerly the leader of the National Alliance, the successor to the Italian Social Movement, begat from the Italian Social Republic, the Salo fiefdom to which Mussolini retreated in 1943. In the last couple of years, Fini – who had once proclaimed Mussolini to be the greatest politician of the 20th century – rolled the National Alliance together with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, to create People For Freedom, and became Berlusconi’s heir presumptive. He now sees that slipping away due to the chaos of PDL.

“Il PDL non me piace,” Fini told the media, which might be rendered as “I’m not so crazy about this party I just helped found.” Berlusconi for his part has been spinning the issue furiously, claiming that the officiousness that led to his candidate being excluded was a prime example of the officiousness he had been fighting. In Rome, yesterday, two thousand PDL supporters rallied, trying to turn the issue into one of ‘democracy’.

That is slick indeed – suggesting that enforcing the rules is somehow repressive – but it also smacks of desperation. Berlusconi’s claim to authority has always rested on his claim that he can get things done, and that he runs a party he denounces as stooges. Now with the nominations affair, it’s becoming clear that he can’t make the drones run on time.

“Berlusconi’s rep started to suffer with L’Aquila earthquakes,” a veteran Rome correspondent had told me, in the quiet, even sepulchral atmosphere of the Foreign Correspondents Club, ironically located on Via del (H)Umilita. “He went down and stood there and promised to get things done. There are earthquake victims who’ve been living in temporary housing for thirty years. So he suspended all the rules, to get the money flowing – and, surprise, all the money disappeared.”

His laughter, unrestrained, bounces through the split level club housed in the shell of an ancient building.

But the nominations fiasco is also the result of Berlusconi’s other side, one he has maximised throughout the fifteen years that he’s dominated Italian politics, even when not in power – the way in which he draws farce and carnivale into the centre of the process. For decades the image of Italian politics has been that of an endless, frequently violent seriousness, often entwined with conspiracy, and a farcical other, its principal symbol being the farceur Dario Fo. Berlusconi’s talent was to bring that to the centre of politics, via TV.

“Berlusconi really brought the techniques of TV to Italian politics,” Marco Fedi notes. Fedi is an MP for Party Democratica, the eventual descendent of the PCI, one of 18 MPs representing Italians overseas – Melbourne in his case. A veteran of the left, and of a classical Italian political heritage – “one Christian Democrat parent, one Communist parent,” he says, a remark which startles an American tourist when I later play the tape back at a cafe – “and then he created a revolution from above.”

Berlusconi had got into TV, by starting a channel to supply the spec-built suburb he’d created outside of Milan. Italy’s famously awful TV arose from a ban on private TV networks, which created low range local stations with low budgets – thus making necessary the sort of scratch variety shows that became the stuff of a thousand clip shows.

As the recent film Videocracy demonstrates, Berlusconi prospered by creating pseudo-networks (dozens of synchronised local stations) and then sexing them up. Then he rolled the technique into politics. Italian TV makes Hey Hey Its Saturday look like the matinee show of the Lipinzanner horses – someone spins a wheel, three blondes throw cream filled balloons into the audience, a dwarf sings ‘Guantanamera’ while punting chickens into a basketball hoop, and then a panel of ex-Lotta Continua members and a p-rnstar deconstruct the show so far. It’s a series of discontinuous moments, each justified by its simple percussive effect.

“The left I think is obsessed with truth, with truth telling,” said Giuliano Santoro, an editor at Carta, an independent left magazine. He’s reflecting on the disjuncture of method, between the ‘violet’ movement that is demanding that Berlusconi be prosecuted, its commitment to a notion of truth-telling and judgement, and the merry way in which Berlusconi has until now, cheerfully disregarded that whole framework, the cycle of investigation and exposure, the notion that things might finally be uncovered, which was set into motion by the anti-corruption inquiries of the early 90s, the ‘clean hands’ investigations, which demolished the old party system, and created the conditions for Berlusconi to arise.

One leftist, who had followed the 1994 elections from the Latin American jungles, noted that fellow leftists had seen Berlusconi’s possible victory as unthinkable, a category error, and it is that asymmetrical relationship to the public that Berlusconi has traded on ever since. “The Left has never really had a truly populist figure,” the correspondent notes. “They’re always `these juridical figures. Togliatti used to quote Latin all the time. The closes they got was D’Alema.”

But in Padua, a one-time stronghold of the Left, now dominated by the Northern League, Emilio cautions against seeing Berlusconi’s rise as that of filling a vacuum.

“It was the threat of an organised left taking power that prompted the rise of Belusconi. He went to the Christian Democrats and said ‘my God what are we going to do’, and they offered him a position as a Senator, which is like being buried. So he organised his own party.”

The upside of that was that Berlusconi could make the parties in his own image – face-lifted, s-x addicted, money troughs. The problem is now coming out in the regional elections – the absence of anything resembling a stable party apparatus. Now, with two court cases looming that he has not been able to bat away, a degree of desperation is starting to be visible – such as a ban on political talk shows before the regional elections, even though he controls seven of the eight national TV stations.

At time of writing Berlusconi had been in a meeting with the President, former Communist Giorgio Napolitano, with no clear result, and an attempt to try and postpone the election at a Cabinet meeting tomorrow.

It takes anti-talent to bring Italy to the brink of a constitutional crisis not despite but because officials followed the rules, but Berlusconi appears to have done so – while making a former fascist look like the voice of quiet reason on the Right, and sending a blameless showgirl back to the world of oral hygiene. In bocca al lupe indeed.