Silvio’s not that bad, and Italians aren’t that dumb

Wow. Just what were 50 million eligible voters thinking? How limited must their understanding of politics be if they vote for a guy that most correspondents can easily identify as a dud while bashing out a 700-word analysis piece from their London-based European bureau without even getting out of their jarmies? 

Even if I knew nothing about Italian politics, after reading most reporting coming out of Italy, I would be starting to get suspicious. For a politician to get re-elected – even a politician who controls a lot of media outlet – there must be something more to him than showgirls, callgirls and hair transplants. 

And even if I did accept that Italian voters aren’t that sharp, could a country in which 80 per cent of eligible voters take part in an election really get it so wrong?

Well, here’s the news: there’s a lot more going on in Italian politics than foreign correspondents are either willing or able to tell us. And while Silvio Berlusconi is far from perfect, Italians aren’t shmucks. If il Cavaliere is still rating well in opinion polls, there are reasons for it – reasons that have little to do with his love-life.

The simple truth is that Italians vote for Berlusconi because they understand the complexity of this moment in Italy’s history. They’ve heard all about the prime minister’s legal woes and have concluded – rightly or wrongly – that they trust him more than the judges who are investigating him and the newspapers that are attacking him.

Above all, they trust him more than the country’s shambolic, backward-looking and ineffectual opposition. They made first made that decision in the 1990s, and they’ve yet to change their minds. Whether they did the right thing in electing Silvio Berlusconi isn’t the issue – what matters is that they knew what they were doing.

First up, let’s deal with some of the myths.

Italy’s two largest dailies, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, account for almost one half of all, non-sport dailies sold in Italy (each sells around 900,000 copies). The Roman La Repubblica is militantly hostile to the Berlusconi government; the Corriere, long seen as the mouthpiece of Milan’s old money, treats most of what Berlusconi says or does with a mild sense of horror.

While the Italian executive usually controls Italy’s public broadcaster, the country’s two top-rating TV programs, Ballarò and AnnoZero, are ferocious in their criticism of Berlusconi. The entire third network of the public broadcaster, RaiTre, is dominated by the left.

To suggest that Italians’ voting patterns are distorted by a lack of reliable information on Silvio Berlusconi is wrong and insulting. Italians are smart enough to get the information they need and few of those voting for Berlusconi would be unaware of his legal woes.

If there’s one aspect of Italian society that foreign media has missed, it’s the politicisation of the judiciary. Like all aspects of Italian society, the judiciary is split along party lines. There are judges on the left and on the right of politics and many of them are only too happy to take sides.

Magistrates in Italy assume the role of both investigators and judging judges. They are able to investigate anyone they want, bring that person to trial and even sit as the judging judge after preparing the case for the prosecution.

The powers at magistrates’ disposal are considerable. They can tap anyone’s calls – in fact, Italian phones are the most tapped in the western world. Transcripts of politicians’ phone conversations are quickly leaked to the media – particularly when they revealed salacious details of extra-marital affairs. And suspects can be thrown in jail with very little evidence against them – known as carcere preventivo.

Picture this: Kevin Rudd is pursued by a magistrate with links to the Liberal Party. The judge leaks the prime minister’s private phone conversations in an effort to damage his standing in the community, brings questionable and unsubstantiated charges against him and forces him to appear in court.

How would we respond to that in Australia? What would we make of unelected members of the judiciary – under the full protection of the constitution – becoming political players?

None of this is to say that there may not be some merit in the charges which left-wing magistrates regularly bring against Silvio Berlusconi. Yet voters appear to have weighed all of this up and decided to vote for him anyway.

When in the 1990s a whole generation of politicians was all but wiped out by the corruption scandals known as Tangentopoli, it left a void which needed to be filled. Berlusconi’s background as a businessman was a breath of fresh air and his cred as a self-made-man (a most unusual thing in Italy’s fossilised private sector) made him attractive.

All of that meant more to voters than the often unflattering history of how Berlusconi made his billions, as well as the problems of conflict of interest.

Italians preferred Berlusconi – with all of his flaws – to a left-wing opposition still dominated by crusty former communists who many had good reason not to trust.

This brings us to the opposition Democratic Party (PD), which has just elected former Communist apparatchik Pierluigi Bersani as its new leader. The PD just can’t win a trick: it stands for little other than opposing Berlusconi and it can’t move away from the dreariness of its Communist past. Berlusconi’s success is also a reflection of the appalling state of the country’s opposition.

None of this is to say that Berlusconi is the leader Italy deserves. Yet it was the Italians who came up with the concept of ‘holding your nose while voting’ – they did it for 50 years under the Christian Democrats.

That’s what they’re doing now: they prefer the smelly guy to subversive judges and grey, former Communists. And they know what they’re doing.