If there is one word that defines Silvio Berlusconi it is “irrepressible”. Even if he has won only a narrow election victory, it amounts to a remarkable comeback for a man written off by his critics as too old (at 71), too prone to vulgar gaffes, too wedded to vested interests and too dogged by corruption allegations to be the man chosen by Italians reverse to the country's economic and social decline.
His success is a blow for the centre-Left, which had pinned its hopes on Walter Veltroni, 52, the former Mayor of Rome, who had cast himself as the Barack Obama of Italy with a message of hope and change. Mr Veltroni took a gamble by forming the Democratic Party from liberals and former Communists and excluding the far-Left and Greens in an attempt to capture the middle ground.
The gamble nearly came off — but not quite, although Mr Veltroni can comfort himself with the thought that the Democratic Party is the largest party in Parliament. The election turnout was lower than in 2006, indicating that some Italians were too disillusioned to vote at all.
Many will have been persuaded by the anti-Veltroni points at which Mr Berlusconi hammered away in the campaign — that Mr Veltroni is a former Communist; that when Mayor of Rome he posed with film stars but failed to tackle illegal immigration and urban degradation; but above all that he was associated with the Government of Romano Prodi, during which Italy was overtaken by Spain economically and uncollected rubbish piled up in the streets of Naples.
It was a vintage hustings performance by a man who began as a cruise ship entertainer, made a fortune in property development in Milan and then in television before entering politics in 1994 to revive the centre-Right after the collapse of Christian Democracy and “save the country from the Communists”.
For many middle-class Italians, fear and loathing of the Left proved stronger in this election than doubts about Mr Berlusconi and his more dubious allies such as the separatist Northern League. They forgave his gaffes in the closing stages of the campaign: his assertion that right-wing women were more attractive than those on the Left; his description of Francesco Totti, the revered captain of AS Roma, as “out of his mind” for backing the centre-Left candidate for Mayor of Rome; his praise of a convicted mafioso who was once on his staff as a “hero”.
But Italians know that — as one of his aides put it during the campaign — he tends to “say the first thing that comes into his head”. During Mr Berlusconi's last period in power, from 2001 to 2006, he compared a German MEP with a kapo in a Nazi concentration camp, and suggested that the Danish Prime Minister should have an affair with his wife, the former actress Veronica Lario, because he was good looking.
He later had to apologise to his wife publicly for flirting in public with voluptuous television showgirls, offering to run off with one and marry another. When Tony and Cherie Blair visited him at his villa in Sardinia he wore a jaunty piratical bandana to hide a hair transplant. He told another visitor — Boris Johnson, then Editor of the Spectator — that Mussolini had been a benign dictator who did not murder opponents but sent them “on holiday” (that is, into exile).
After losing power to Mr Prodi in 2006 he refused at first to step down, alleging voting “irregularities”, and retreated to Sardinia, where he staged a fake volcanic eruption during a fireworks party and was photographed with yet more showgirls from his Mediaset television empire. He denied he intended to form “the People of Liberty” from his Forza Italia and the far-Right Alleanza Nazionale — then proceeded to do precisely that after Mr Veltroni formed the Democratic Party.
During the campaign he referred to his short height (he wears stacked heels), claiming that he was taller than either Vladimir Putin or Nicolas Sarkozy. The magistrates who have invesitaged him repeatedly for corruption, he said, should have regular mental health checks. Accused of failing to revive Italy's economy when he was in power, leaving it with near-zero growth and a huge deficit, he blithely deflected the blame on to Mr Prodi.
In the campaign he waved the nationalist and protectionist flag, sinking the Air France KLM bid for the near-bankrupt Alitalia by vowing to put together an all Italian consortium — which never materalised.
He has been mocked mercilessly for his cosmetic surgery and permatan, his empty promises, his male chauvinism. Yet he bounces back — and although Mr Veltroni claimed Mr Berlusconi looked “tired” during the campaign, he showed extraordinary energy and infectious optimism. He is still the dominant figure on the Italian political stage while other European leaders - Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, José Maria Aznar, Gerhard Schröder — have all gone.
The next step, it is rumoured, is for him to stand for election as head of state. Many Italians, it seems, remain seduced by his promise to make them as rich as he is — and his entertainment value. What he has to prove however is that he can use his last term of office to do what he failed to do last time, and generate growth, raise productivity, encourage investment, tackle the crippling bureaucracy, nepotism and organised crime — and give Italy hope.
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