Society
Italians have hardly cut their baby teeth on democracy
Published 14 May 2001
My Italian cousin, visiting from Milan, was livid: the Economist was a dirty little rag, she screeched. The Financial Times was a waste of paper. Like so many of her compatriots, Francesca is fed up to the back teeth with the campaign run by foreign newspapers against Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's leading prime ministerial candidate. My cousin is no fan of the Cavaliere, who made a hash of being PM first time around, in 1994. His right-wing xenophobia has grown more strident, and dark tales about Mafia links follow him like faithful corgis. But she is furious that the only viable opposition Berlusconi faces comes not from his political opponents, the centre-left coalition led by Francesco Rutelli, but from the media.
I point out that the same is true here in Britain, where only the Telegraph group, Rory Bremner and a handful of columnists such as Nick Cohen and Mark Steel are giving Tony Blair and co a rough ride.
In Italy, though, media intervention - whether national or foreign - is more dangerous. British parliamentary democracy has long and strong roots, but in Italy politics has only just crawled out of the shadow of the Mafia, the secret deal-making of the Masons of P2 and a vast network of corruption that saw brown envelopes being passed around from one bureaucratic circle of hell to another. Britons may be weary of parliamentary politics - but Italians haven't even cut their baby teeth on it. Admittedly, it's not an appetising prospect: parliament, Italian-style, has been allowed by proportional representation to become a pasta bowl of parties coalesced around such issues as hunting, anti-immigration and free love (who could forget Cicciolina?). This messy mob is ruled by coalitions that charge through the endlessly revolving doors - never staying long enough to foster real allegiance or push through sensible policies.
As a consequence, Italians' indifference to politics is palpable in everything from tax evasion to television - serious political coverage has shrunk to three programmes, even during election time. In this climate, the efforts of the press to take on the role of opposition - or indeed, as Berlusconi shows, any political role - are dangerous. A people familiar with parliamentary debate and used to democratic accountability can see the media for what they are: a conduit of facts and opinion that engages with the political system. But novices to parliamentary democracy may mistake the medium for the message - and short-circuit the political system altogether. This explains Berlusconi's emergence, and talk of the press as his only scourge.
Since Berlusconi owns three of the main television stations, the largest publishing house and one newspaper, Il Giornale, the home-grown media can mount an opposition only with difficulty. The state-owned Rai television has to respect rules of impartiality and equal time; elsewhere, Berlusconi's media empire squeezes out all debate. Little wonder that the task of Berlusconi-baiting is being appropriated by foreigners.
But this carries another risk: the humiliation of the world's sixth-largest economy. The foreign press cannot expose Berlusconi without exposing the electorate that voted him in as an opportunistic people indifferent to civic claims and responsibilities. "In any self-respecting democracy, it would be unthinkable," opined the Economist last week.
Equally, Italians are sensitive to being dismissed as nothing more than a foreign power's protectorate: they've already played that role during the "miracle" years following the war, when, thanks to the American Marshall Plan, Italy rebuilt itself. They are hypersensitive to the whisperings that the CIA continued the protectorate well into the Eighties by secretly propping up the corrupt right-wing Democrazia Cristiana.
My cousin is right. Foreign journalists may stop Berlusconi in his tracks, but they risk giving Italians a dangerous lesson in democracy: parliament is the press's poodle.
Peter Semler: A sword over Europe, page 32
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