Silvio Berlusconi is dead, long live Silvio Berlusconi!” As the four times former Italian Prime Minister passed away last June 12th, most of the Boot’s press has started an apologetical narration on his life, portraying him as a statesman that, even though he had sparked outrage and polemics throughout all his life, eventually had always been caring towards his country. This rhetoric has been imposed nationwide as the center-right government led by Giorgia Meloni declared soon after Berlusconi’s passing away a four-day national mourning and granted him the State funeral in the politician’s hometown, Milan.
The ceremony was a show of power, all the highest authorities of the country attended the mass officiated by Milan’s archbishop on June 15th. But the event was missed by all world leaders but Qatar’s, Iraq’s and San Marino’s: a clear sign that the Italian political figure was too controversial and that the presence of lots of international leaders could have sparked an outrage no one wanted to actually face in their home country. The portrait of Silvio Berlusconi that emerged from the international press was indeed pretty different from the one showcased in the Italian one (with some due exceptions), as outside Italy journalists underlined above all the legal troubles–the charges of bribery, tax fraud and underage prostitution,–as well as the accusation of collusion with the Mafia.
It’s this very background that has led many Italians to protest against the measures included in the national mourning. University students demonstrated and signed petitions to oppose the flags being flown at half-mast, meanwhile audiences in state-run theaters started screaming and booing when the mandatory one minute of silence was announced before the plays’ starting. The glorification of Berlusconi’s historical figure has thence not had the effect hoped by his supporters, and there should be no surprise: he had built all his character out of a huge contraposition towards his opponents, he wasn’t a mediator, but rather introduced a stronger polarization in Italian politics, using populism and low-level humor as a political weapon. As the journalist Marco Travaglio, Berlusconi’s historical opponent, declared: “There has been an embarrassing beatification. He wouldn’t have wanted to be portrayed like a saint.”
As a matter of fact the former Italian PM didn’t put so much effort in building a plain reputation in the last years, as in many public occasions he dived into sexist remarks, not fit for a statesman: like when someone in the crowd during a rally asked him “Mr President, blonde or brunette?” and he replied “It just matters that they give that to you;” or when he promised his football team’s players that if they had beaten a major opponent in the league he would have brought them a bus “full of whores.”
After the first rumors of the orgies and the prostitution involving himself broke out, Berlusconi initially denied–it’s memorably him saying orgies were rather “elegant dinners”–but then he started understanding that lots of Italians were rather fascinated by those stories and he started joking about it, filling his speeches of double entendres, approaching women while delivering public speeches, even showing physical appreciation to Michelle Obama in 2009.
Of course the man had his own attitude, but there was a strategy too: he aimed at the silent majorities’ instincts, their fascination for the man of power surrounded by beautiful women getting whatever he wanted. In a way that was genius. After decades of an austere politics driven by Christian Democrat politicians who preferred to keep their public image clean, he understood the country had enough of the moralization of the customs. Berlusconi has always been said to have inaugurated Italy’s Second Republic and the sexualization of politics was one of his most remarkable contributions.
Anyway, to his supporters his passing away was like losing a landmark: his party, Forza Italia, was basically a personal creature and now that he’s gone few people would bet that the party won’t be torn apart by internal struggles. That could eventually even harm the tenure of Meloni’s cabinet, whose Forza Italia is a major partner. The same could be said about his empire of televisions, press, buildings and financial stocks.
Berlusconi was a religion: he made a mistake, he said it wasn’t, his supporters believed him, he created enemies to justify any single misbehavior, he attacked the Communists, the judges, the left and he often claimed to have been victim of non-violent and secret coup attempts. There’s no way anyone can replace him, he was unique and his heritage would rather end up in the public consciousness than in a specific person.
His faithfuls have lost their idol, but for them it’s time to ask themselves whether to still live under the heavy shadow of what Berlusconi was, or face the truth as Nietzsche suggested in the Gay Science:
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, – who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?”.
