Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. His fourth novel, The Imposters, will be published this month.
That smirk: cheeks twitching, delighted with himself.
There he was, Silvio Berlusconi, engulfed by a mosh of reporters like me, sweating under the Roman sun, reaching out our Dictaphones (this was 2002), and awaiting the next off-colour remark from the man who sweated nothing.
The difficulty when writing about Mr. Berlusconi was the same as the simplicity of reporting on him: his controversies were so numerous, so astonishing, so shaming (to any other leader). You struggled to explain how he survived.
Outside Italy, casual observers snickered about the then-prime minister, viewing him as a buffoon in a double-breasted suit, an image that fed on stereotypes about Italy: that the country was all comic melodrama, mobsters, mangia mangia.
Yet Italy has always produced originals who changed the world, some for good, some for bad. Mr. Berlusconi was an innovator too, with a legacy that survives his death Monday, influencing the tactics of politicians from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to Boris Johnson.
Mr. Berlusconi’s terms in office – serving longer than anyone in postwar Italy – amounted to egocracy: rule by one man’s vanity. He was hardly the first man to repurpose a country as the front operation for his soul, but his innovation was “shame-stripping”: a flat refusal to accept shame for anything, flipping public disgrace into personal outrage. By doing so, he stripped moral standards of their power, and then strutted right past their cordons.
By way of example, Mr. Berlusconi routinely demeaned women, even reportedly remarking, in a wiretapped conversation, that Germany’s then-chancellor Angela Merkel was too heavy to have sex with. (His wording was more offensive than mine.)
Other politicians, if caught making such a reprehensible comment, might be finished. Mr. Berlusconi would simply scoff over various cruel and offensive remarks, both denying guilt and playing the anti-woke game before it existed, winking at supporters as if to say, Come on – I know you’re thinking it too!
You might imagine that contempt for women would erase support from at least half the population. However, many considered the charismatic showman a tonic from all the outwardly upright pols who were less upright in private, and who anyway failed to deliver riches and national pride.
Mr. Berlusconi faced a long series of criminal allegations too – so many that I’d exceed my word count many times over to explain them. Suffice to say that he denied countless unsavoury charges, mainly fraud and bribery.
His most notorious case came in 2011, when Mr. Berlusconi was accused of paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl when he had been 73. He was first sentenced to jail, then had the conviction overturned on appeal.
When it came to criminal indictments, Mr. Berlusconi’s shame-stripping was not the defiant I’m-doing-it-anyway kind. It was more insidious, a gradual chipping away at taboos, first denying the charges in anger, then suggesting that only prigs cared, then that his accusers were hypocrites who did far worse, characterizing each prosecution as a persecution. It’s a conspiracy!
The shame-stripping politician wobbles reality like a baby tooth, until it’s ready to come out, replaced by a gap where much more besides can get through.
Mr. Berlusconi never stopped ranting about prosecutors, accusing them of pursuing a witch hunt against him. Same with Mr. Trump. Same with Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Berlusconi even treated Italy’s shameful past with irreverence, once telling two British journalists that the Fascist dictatorship (which committed crimes against humanity, and led Italy to defeat in the Second World War) hadn’t been so bad. “Mussolini did not murder anyone,” Mr. Berlusconi said. “Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them.”
One of the two British journalists taking notes? Mr. Johnson himself.
Those who still consider Mr. Berlusconi a harmless chucklehead should know that among his last political causes was supporting Mr. Putin in his invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi spent years buddying around with Mr. Putin. In 2003, I recall a news conference of the two, when Mr. Berlusconi chastised journalists for suggesting that the Russian leader violated the rule of law – then joked that he could charge Mr. Putin for acting as his advocate.
Smiling, Mr. Putin responded: “I am ready to pay. And he is worth the money.”
For shame-stripping to work, the politician must bypass the pesky press, and flirt directly with the public. Social media allows for this, along with the right/left polarization of news sources.
But the billionaire tycoon Mr. Berlusconi got there first, owning key TV channels and newspapers that covered him indulgently, and providing such box-office entertainment that opposition media could not resist amplifying his shock-jock quips, thus desensitizing the public.
Sound familiar? It’s how Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson – without personally owning the press – have owned the press.
At Mr. Berlusconi’s peak, his political opponents squirmed. How to contend with this man who seemed so awful, yet so unbeatable? They suffered moral asymmetry, whereby those who play by the rules are penalized, and those who scorn them prevail.
It’s as if you were playing soccer, and your opponent shoves you to the ground, picks up the ball, throws it in the net and runs around celebrating. You look up, waiting for the ref to produce a red card – but the crowd is roaring in approval, and the scoreboard registers a goal. Wait – surely that shouldn’t count?
The worst effect is convincing citizens that they must cheat to succeed. That is why shame-stripping flourishes when the referees – the justice system, the media, the voters – fail to insist on the rules.
This kind of politics ends in one of two places. Either it filters down through society, normalizing cruelty and self-interest. Or the public tires of the shame-stripping politician, who only ever governed for himself, and so invariably wrecks the country. In the end, people will yearn for competence again. You must hope that democracy remains intact by then.
As for Mr. Berlusconi, he was hard to resist – hard to avoid snorting in amazement, hard not to grimace at what he said, hard to stop watching.
But from up close, you saw the pancake makeup and the decay beneath. Worse, you saw decay beyond the press scrum, exuding from corrosive ways, seeping across the piazza, around the country, and over the seas too, sullying the world he has now left behind.