Frank Viviano's World View

  In many ways, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is as venerably Italian as the Roman Colliseum, a master of political strategies that date back to the Caesars.

If current polls prove accurate, those skills will be back in command in Italy after next month's national election, when the controversial twice-elected (and twice-ejected) Berlusconi is expected to complete his latest resurrection – a suitably overblown description for a politician who has openly compared himself to Jesus Christ.

But first-century Rome is not merely where twenty-first-century Italian politics is headed. Increasingly, it appears to be the prevailing model for electoral democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

In a word, that model is what Italians call spettacolo (show business).

BREAD AND CIRCUSES
In ancient Rome, of course, there were no popular elections. Nonetheless, its emperors recognized that public discontent could be toxic, and the result in domestic affairs was a policy known as "bread and circuses." Keep people well-fed and mindlessly amused, the theory went, and they'll take no interest in the shenanigans of an unimaginably wealthy imperial family or a corrupt senate.

The opposite cornerstone of Roman show business was security, and its mortar was engineered paranoia. Keep people frightened – of barbarian threats from the outside and crime at home – and they'll accept almost anything in return for the semblance of protection.

Sound familiar? Fear, sometimes real, sometimes entirely imaginary and nearly always manipulative, is a mainstay of contemporary political rhetoric. Substitute today's consumer-driven fiscal policies and spin-conscious election campaigns for bread and circuses, and the echo of ancient Rome is loud and clear.

No single player on the international scene has invoked that echo longer, or more effectively, than 72-year-old Silvio Berlusconi, the man now favored to win the April 13-14 election and return to power.

In a sense, he trained himself precisely for this role, beginning his climb to the Palazzo Chigi, the Italian equivalent of the White House, as a crooner belting out torchsongs in the nightclubs of cruise ships. Early in his political career, he settled on Communism and immigrant crime as convincing lyrics for a security ballad, and in 1993 launched his own political party, Forza Italia ("Go Italy!"). Along the way, in a steep ascent that generated an $11 billion personal fortune – and two decades' worth of criminal investigations – he also acquired a dazzling array of businesses under the umbrella of a holding company named Fininvest.

Its subsidiaries include supermarkets, department stores and insurance firms, but the heart of the Fininvest empire belongs to the media, where Berlusconi's level of national control far exceeds the wildest dreams of his fellow statesmen.

Financial analysts estimate that the prime ministership gives Berlusconi control over 90 percent of Italian television, much of it as the chief stockholder in Mediaset, the nation's largest private broadcasting group, with the balance as a result of his de facto political grip on Italy's three public networks. His companies are also responsible for an astounding 60 percent of all advertising sales in Italy – the essential modern ingredient in bread and circuses alike.

Berlusconi's profile is only slightly less overwhelming in the print media, where he controls more than a third of all book and magazine publishing and a leading national newspaper. In any case, reading is of minimal importance in Italy. Fewer than 100 newspapers are now purchased there for every 1,000 people, just one-fifth the per capita total for northern European countries.

That may be Berlusconi's most significant contribution to politics: the final triumph of advertising and mass consumption, of spettacolo, over information.

There is certainly no mistaking its dominance in his own empire. The hallmarks of Mediaset television are blizzards of commercials, interspersed with AC Milan soccer matches – Berlusconi is the team's owner – game shows, "reality TV" serials and vaudeville extravaganzas featuring leggy troupes of scantily-clad young women. The spin-doctors of first-century Rome would be jealous.

THE INVISIBLE CRIME WAVE
When Berlusconi television displaces soccer and softcore porn in favor of news, the media diet shifts effortlessly from undisguised tittilation to irrational fear.

The impression – especially in election-year broadcasting – is of a nation under siege, beset on all sides by criminals, most of who seem to be immigants from Islamic countries, the modern equivalent of the Barbarians who threatened ancient Rome. Ordinary Italians, in the plot of this grim soap opera, have been left utterly defenseless by their government since Berlusconi and his coalition partners were voted out of office in 2006. They were replaced by what he refers to usually as "Communists" and now and then as coglioni, a vulgar insult that literally translates as "testicles" and suggests cowardice in the face of danger.

The striking thing about this picture is that it bears as much similarity to reality as do the reality television shows favored by Mediaset.

Fear-crazed Italy, where 35 percent of the population regards the nighttime streets as too dangerous to walk – twice the percentage in the United States – is actually among the safest countries on Earth. The U.S. per capital homicide rate is almost four times higher than the figure for Italy, according to UN statistics. More unexpected is learning that the risk of being murdered in Sweden, Canada, Finland, Britain and Portugal is between 50 percent and 300 percent higher than in Italy – which has seen its homicide rate drop by more than half since 1991.

What matters is not that the fear-mongering has no basis in fact. It is that the public invariably falls for it.

As for the menace of Communism, it no longer exists as a realistic political alternative anywhere in Europe. In Italy, the once-powerful Communist Party long ago broke up into warring factions. The largest fragment – recently reorganized as the Democratic Party by Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, 52, who leads the campaign against Berlusconi – has abandoned almost every principle that might be confused with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Over the past two years, Italy has been led by former banker and European Union President Romano Prodi, who implemented a tightfisted spending program that could have been designed by Alan Greenspan. No-nonsense fiscal austerity, Prodi felt, was the only way to attack Italy's disastrous economic problems, the most visible legacy of Berlusconi's five years in power from 2001 to 2006 – the longest reign in postwar Italian history.

Prodi's austerity program made unexpected progress in very short time, significantly reducing the national debt and restoring the confidence of investors. But it was fatally undermined by Berlusconi's endless, widely-publicized claims that his rivals were slaves to Communist influence and indifferent to crime.

SOUND FAMILIAR?
Where the spectres of crime and subversion ought to be haunting Italy is politics itself. This may be the only western democracy in which it is necessary to postpone court hearings, on standing allegations of graft and corruption, because the defendant – Silvio Berlusconi – is busy running for the the nation's highest office.

Overall, one in ten Italian legislators has been convicted of illegal acitivities. Since 1990 alone, Berlusconi himself has been the subject of more than a dozen criminal indictments and trials, on charges including perjury, involvement with organized crime, bribing financial investigators and judges (three times), illegal campaign financing, false accounting (eight times), embezzlement and tax fraud (twice). In the majority of these cases, charges were eventually dropped because trials dragged on until the statute of limitations ran out, or because as prime minister Berlusconi acquired immunity from criminal prosecution.

Yet like the excesses of his distant predecessors in Imperial Rome, none of his misadventures seem to trouble vast numbers of Italian voters. It's enough for them to hear, as they do nearly every day on Italian television this election season, that a Berlusconi government will eliminate property taxes altogether, and cut every other tax to the bare bone.

No one knows where the money will come from to run Italy's schools or update its infrastructure, which is arguably the most disfunctional in Europe – just as no one knows, exactly, what can be done to halt a violent nationwide crime wave that is statistically non-existent.

All of this might seem too idiosyncratically Italian, too evocative of a political system that has long been treated as comic farce by foreign observers, if its most devastating punchlines weren't painfully close to home.

Heedless promises of tax cuts. Calls for an all-out war on crime. The door slammed on immigrants. The politics of immense personal wealth. A legislature awash in criminal indictments. The triumph of cheap spectacle over real information. The fragile state of truth. 

Sound familiar?