Tim Parks The Guardian, Friday 21 December 2012 21.30 GMT
The flamboyant, cavalier Silvio Berlusconi is emblematic of where Italy and Europe's political culture stands
Returning to the fray ... Silvio Berlusconi is not a buffoon, despite appearances to the contrary. Photograph: Guido Montani/EPA
Fired up perhaps by his engagement to a woman 49 years younger than himself, the 76-year-old Silvio Berlusconi has announced his return to politics. He will head the centre-right Popolo della Libertà (PDL) in spring elections. His successor – the unelected Mario Monti – is, he says, pushing the country into recession with his austerity programme, and the PDL will no longer support him.
In response, Monti immediately announced his resignation. European leaders threw up their arms in horror. The markets got nervous and interest rates on Italian government bonds shot up. Important elements of Berlusconi's party rebelled and threatened a split; if Monti stands as a candidate for a centrist coalition, they will join him, they say. Meanwhile, the Partito Democratico (PD), the leftwing opposition, is gloating. With opinion polls giving them a good lead, the election seems in the bag.
What does Berlusconi do? He says that if Monti stands for election, he will withdraw his own candidacy and support him. Bizarre? He then says that, if he is elected himself, his first action will be to abolish a hated property tax that Monti slapped on first-home ownership. At once, the threat of a split in the PDL fades. If Monti enters the fray, the rebels will be able to support him from within the PDL. If he doesn't, then they have no leader to leave the party for.
So the spotlight is on Monti; this affable, civilised man must decide if he's ready for the mudslinging and misinformation of a real election campaign. Don't do it, scream senators on the left. Alarmingly, Berlusconi's manoeuvering has put their victory in doubt. The more they tell Monti not to stand, the more vulnerable they seem.
Does any of this matter to the British reader? Does it do anything other than confirm that the Italian political scene is chaotic and incomprehensible, even for those of us who've lived in the country for 30 years? I think it does.
First, Berlusconi is not a buffoon. It's true he's on trial for inducing a minor to prostitution. It's true he has been endlessly in court on charges of bribery and corruption. It's true that he never fails to produce comically inappropriate innuendos at international summits. But in politics, context is everything. Berlusconi owns large parts of the Italian press, and that makes other parts of it wary of attacking him. He is vastly wealthy and proportionately dangerous.
His criticism of Monti's economic policy is exactly Ed Miliband's criticism of Cameron's. His position on the euro – that it is unsustainable and largely responsible for Italy's declining competitiveness – is comparable with the prevailing orthodoxy in the UK. He is the only senior Italian politician with the courage to say such things, though he regularly eats his words as soon as spoken. In general, he allows everyone who responds to his charm to believe that he shares their views. The madder the man seems, the more you can be sure there is method in his mayhem.
But the deeper significance of Berlusconi's return is its revelation of a crisis of leadership, something hardly limited to Italy. In an attempt to boost their party leaders, Italians have taken to the US habit of holding primaries. It hasn't worked. The left has just reelected Pier Luigi Bersani, an agreeable but yawningly dull party stalwart. From the moment the left started bowing to economic necessity and backing pension cuts and tax increases, it lost all ideological steam, and now excites no one at all.
On the right, the PDL was about to hold primaries when Berlusconi intervened and had them called off. There were no suitable candidates, he claimed. As a result, he was simply obliged to come back himself. This might appear to be megalomania, but there is a general perception he was right. None of the motley group of yes men who put themselves forward for the primaries had any chance of inspiring the public.
Aside from the main leaders, there are comedian Beppe Grillo and economist Mario Monti. Grillo, a heavily bearded, rudely physical presence whose brutal charisma flowers mainly in the territory of insult, has formed a popular movement which attributes all the country's ills to its evil politicians, offering honesty and integrity as its only policies. Surveys give Grillo around 17% of the vote. Nobody has any idea what his presence in an eventual government might mean.
Monti himself hesitates to stand. He is not a politician. He has no vision for the future beyond putting some order into Italy's fiscal system and keeping European partners and international investors happy. His success to date is as much one of image as achievement: the fact he is not a politician who is trying to please the people cheers up the bankers hugely.
This absence of political vision is no doubt related to the fact that, even if elected, a leader's powers are minimal. If no one has the stomach to abandon the euro, then there is little one can do but toe the austerity line. Since Europe is guided from Berlin and Paris, there is no way Italy can exercise much influence on its policies. Italian papers regularly complain that the country is becoming a European colony. The overwhelming feeling is one of being trapped in a world machine of inexorable momentum; the only thing a leader can do is fight for a bit of candy at some summit, then try to share it out at home without having his fingers bitten off. The larger picture is beyond his grasp. With no power there is no point in having vision. Put the other way round, people who do have vision will not waste their time in roles where they have no power.
Crises famously serve to prompt therapeutic change. This can't happen if all a leader feels he can do is keep a moribund nation on life support in the hope that a miracle drug might be discovered. That is the point European politics is at. One of the last measures the Monti government has passed is a decree that saves ILVA, the huge steel plant in Taranto, from being closed. Pollution from ILVA is blamed for rising cancer rates in the area, although lawyers for the plant deny there is a link. Local magistrates had ordered the arrest of the company's owners and sought to close it. But thousands of jobs and vast wealth are at stake. Monti's decree reopened the plant, promising cleaner industrial processes. Few believe they will be imposed. The newspapers hardly report the ongoing local protests: the school massacre in Connecticut offers a much easier subject. Nobody even mentions the possibility of a world less driven by the need to produce steel.
The underlying message is always that the problems – world trade, global warming – are too big to tackle. This sense of impotence is now general throughout Europe. Amid all this, a flamboyant Berlusconi, who uses his declining energies to keep his business empire intact, regardless of the collective good, is actually wonderfully emblematic of where our culture stands.
