The man who would be king

Silvio Berlusconi is a prime minister like no other. But the nightclub crooner who became Italy's richest man has been trying hard, since he was elected, to curb his flamboyant ways. So why, then, has he decided to release an album of Christmas songs?

Silvio Berlusconi has been prime minister of Italy for 18 months now. The sky has not fallen. Visitors will find no startling changes. Fiat, Italy's biggest employer, is in terrible trouble, it's true – but on Tuesday Berlusconi proposed a simple solution: change the firm's name to Ferrari! (Fiat's directors were not amused). And to prove how bright and breezy he feels, he is putting out an album of his own songs for Christmas. Profits to charity, naturally.

Mr Berlusconi's election campaign 18 months ago was obsessively focused on the man himself. Candidates for his party, Forza Italia, were recommended to put Berlusconi's picture, not their own, on campaign literature. Huge images of the man were everywhere, not least on television, more than 40 per cent of which was in his pocket. Forza Italia was Berlusconi: without him it was nothing, and everybody knew that. With him at its head, the party needed little else – had little need of policies, for example. The party's manifesto was published one week before polling day.

A figure of Orwellian size, with a permanent, gleaming smile, bestriding an odd sort of country – that's how it looked. But take another look today. The Cheshire Cat has vanished, grin and all. No sign of a personality cult. No sign of a dictatorship. The airwaves, more than 90 per cent of which (including the national broadcaster, Rai) Berlusconi now directly or indirectly controls, are as full of fluff as ever, but there are frequent political debates, too, and they are raucously uninhibited. And Berlusconi does not get it all his own way on the news: if government sympathies dominate on Canale 5 and Rete 4, Berlusconi's enemies get a good suck of the sauce bottle on Rai 3 and La 7. A Berlusconi friend and supporter Giuliano Ferrara seems to host a political programme practically every night of the week, but this bearded, Falstaffian ex-Communist has such a brilliant television presence that he would be a natural for intelligent television anywhere.

So where exactly is the problem? To be sure, Italy's economy is in trouble, the national debt is swelling, none of the promises of 18 months ago – massive infrastructure projects, a million new jobs, lower taxes – looks remotely within reach. Mr Berlusconi is learning all over again, as he learnt rudely and fast during his seven-month tenure in 1994, that steering a country in the direction of growth and prosperity is far more complicated than doing the same for a business enterprise.

But arguably Berlusconi is in it for the long term now: during more than six years in opposition, this tireless, hard-driving, self-made man learnt many of the skills required to govern one of the world's leading industrial countries. Now he knows, for example, that he cannot fob off his cantankerous but important ally Umberto Bossi, leader of the quasi-secessionist Northern League, with promises: urgently now, with a deadline of next Monday, he has been ramming through parliament the legislation to devolve control of health, education and local policing to the regions, the first step in the federalism long cherished by Bossi. Eight years ago it was Bossi, dubbing the Prime Minister "Berluskaiser", who brought his government down. This time the kaiser will be more careful.

Berlusconi has devoted most of his effort since winning the election to getting the judges off his back. Fighting off frenzied attacks by the opposition, he has finally got his "legitimate suspicion" bill signed into law by President Ciampi, permitting the alleged bias of judges to be raised before the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court. If the court agrees that the judges in question are indeed suspect, a case can now be transferred to a more balanced (or sympathetic) bench somewhere else. Berlusconi has maintained for years that Milan's "left-wing" judiciary was out to get him; in parliament his opponents insisted that the over-riding purpose of the bill was to rescue his loyal friend Cesare Previti from the court in Milan where he is standing trial on charges of bribing judges. And indeed, almost immediately the legitimate suspicion bill became law, the Previti trial was suspended.

But now that those fireworks are behind him, there is a whiff of normality in the air. The opposition senses it too, grudgingly. Following ex-prime minister Giulio Andreotti's 24-year jail sentence for ordering the murder of a journalist, politicians of all stripes made noises about there being an urgent need to reform the judiciary. Through much of the first year, the opposition responded to Berlusconi's government with barracking and walkouts, fisticuffs and filibuster. Those tactics, they have learnt, are not paying off. Piero Fassino, secretary of the Left Democrats, said on Sunday, "The war of all against all benefits nobody, neither the government nor the opposition."

Eighteen months ago, two weeks before the election, The Economist said Berlusconi was "unfit to lead Italy". The article supporting that judgment described in gruesome detail the panoply of criminal law suits in which the aspirant to Italy's top job was embroiled.

It made gripping reading. But perhaps The Economist got it wrong. For a country such as Italy, with its extraordinary legacy of economic achievement shrugging off a deadweight of bureaucratic inertia, perhaps Mr Berlusconi is the only strong leader available. A little like Mrs Thatcher in the UK 20 years ago: the nasty medicine for the appalling complaint.

There has long been a particular way of writing about, and writing off, the man they call the Cavalier. "In an environment of luxury," wrote a celebrated journalist, Camilla Cederna, after becoming the first person to interview the coming millionaire in 1977, "one drawing room leading into another, meadows of carpet, kinetic sculptures, leather, mahogany and rosewood, a not very tall man is talking away: the face of a baby, lacking even a single wrinkle, but with a moustache, and a little nose like a doll." The intellectual hauteur is unmistakable, her sly mockery of this bank clerk's son's vaulting pretensions, his tireless boosterism, his grand, vulgar ambitions.

All three men currently in charge of Italy's destiny are outsiders. Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini brought the frankly fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano in from the cold eight years ago, rebranding it Alleanza Nationale; Umberto Bossi, who stormed into "Roma Ladrona", "Rome, the Big Thief" from his northern stronghold like a modern-day Visigoth, was a guitarist, maths tutor and labourer before turning to politics. Berlusconi was an outsider, too: his origins obscure and provincial. But it is his ties to the powerful and tainted insiders of Italian politics that explain his rise.

He was born into a middle-class Milanese family in 1936. Enterprise was manifested early: he did other pupils' homework as well as his own – if they paid. But although his father rose to the position of bank manager, Berlusconi worked his way through law school: selling vacuum cleaners door to door, working as a crooner at student parties and on cruise liners. After getting top marks for his graduation thesis on advertising, he hurled himself into business.

It was the beginning of the Sixties, and Italy's post-war boom was under way. Berlusconi became a property developer, throwing up apartment blocks on the outskirts of Milan for commuters. "His dream," reported Camilla Cederna in 1977, "is to be in demand all over the world to build up cities. 'Let's call Berlusconi,' will be the cry of places wanting to expand.'' But the tycoon added a caveat: "If urbanism is what is cooked up between developers and powerful politicians, then that's not me."

Yet that was exactly how he worked. To grow at the speed he grew – from penniless student to wealthy property developer in a decade – would have been impossible if he had not had cosy relations with the powerful. He was close successively to senior leaders in the Christian Democrats and then in the Socialists, the two parties whose shared hegemony gave Italy fragile, short-lived governments for nearly 60 years.

Like all successful Italian businessmen, Berlusconi thrived on the deep-rooted, indeed ancient, custom of clientelism, whereby a businessman and a politician strike up a friendship to the benefit of both and the detriment of the public purse. The politician provides his client with jobs, licences, and official favours of one sort and another in return for the client's loyal support. Such relationships, which were obviously in defiance of the greater common good, and often in defiance of the law, too, were the rocks on which Italy's industrial success was built. And they were not restricted to the circles of the great and powerful: they were the way anyone, at practically any level of society, exerted the necessary influence to get things done.

As the scholar Paul Ginsborg writes in his recent book, Italy and Its Discontents, "Patron-client relations, the exchange of favours, the use of kin and friends, became an accepted way for families to negotiate and traverse the bureaucracy. The state was not seen either as impartial or benevolent, but rather as a container of resources which individuals and families, if they found the right keys, could hope to unlock."

Berlusconi went for the biggest locks, and he needed the best and biggest keys. Milan 2, for example, a huge development outside the city, was under Linate airport's flight path when it was built. Four years later, the civil aviation authority obligingly shifted the line of approach to another residential area. Another case: Berlusconi bought a tract of land in the city for 500 lire (15p) per square metre. Eight years later, the public works department rescheduled the land as residential: Berlusconi sold it for a profit of more than 800 per cent. Such crucial shifts in official policy could not have been obtained without very special connections.

Milan 2 proved to be the launch pad from which Berlusconi transformed himself from a local developer to a figure with a national profile. Among its many facilities, the new suburb had cable television. This little local station proved to be the first building block in his media empire. At the time there was no nationwide commercial TV network because none was allowed, only small local outfits like Milan 2's. With massive capital funding – the origins of which have never been explained, and which are being mulled over in the trial of another close Berlusconi colleague, Marcello Dell'Utri, in Sicily, charged with aiding and abetting the Mafia – he simply ignored this ban and established a nationwide commercial network. He flattened his rivals by sheer impudence and determination, ignoring the legal restrictions.

In August 1984 he bought a channel called Rete 4, thereby establishing a near-monopoly of commercial television. Two months later there was a showdown: the courts ordered a partial blacking out of Berlusconi's network. Berlusconi responded in outrage at this violation of the citizen's "libèrta di telecommando", ("right to use the zapper"); within four days the Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, his close friend, the godfather of his child and best man at his marriage, issued a "decree law" overturning the court's ruling. This was clientelism at the highest level, for the highest stakes.

Craxi himself has long gone from the political stage, convicted in absentia of corruption and dying in disgraced exile in Tunisia. Of all the shady and compromised figures in recent Italian political history, he is perhaps the darkest; his leadership, writes Ginsborg, "transformed the [Socialist] party beyond recognition, sucking nearly all and sundry into a vortex of corrupt and authoritarian relations".

Berlusconi's astonishing wealth appears to have been the product of close vertical relationships with loyal retainers on the one hand, and reliable patrons, notably Craxi, on the other.

How and why did Berlusconi turn to politics? "I chose to enter the field," he has written, "and occupy myself with public affairs because I didn't want to live in an illiberal country, governed by immature forces and by men committed to a failed political and economic past." Or, if you like: in the maelstrom of 1992 to 1994, when Italy's ruling parties were swept away in the backwash of Tangentopoli, the huge, Milan-based investigation into corruption, Berlusconi lost the patrons who had long ensured his safety and success. Now his empire was horribly at risk, and the legality of his business dealings open to piercing scrutiny. So he did the one vastly ambitious thing: transformed himself from client into super-patron.

It is hard to overstate the boldness of the Forza Italia undertaking: as if Bill Gates were overnight to turn Microsoft into a political party, and within a year snatch the American presidency. Only at a time when the established political forces were in meltdown could it have worked.

That it did so, and worked again in April 2001, proves that Silvio Berlusconi is more than a massively rich manipulator. As the booklet An Italian Story, distributed in the millions before the last election, underlined, his life is a modern Italian fable of difficulties overcome, enemies confounded, vast success achieved. "Italy is the country I love," he wrote, "where my roots are, my hopes and my horizons. Here I have learnt, from my father and from life. Here I have gained my passion for liberty."

"Liberty" is the great Berlusconian buzzword; his coalition government is called "the House of Liberties". But what is liberty to Berlusconi? The liberty of citizens to become a little like the great man himself: full of ambition for self and family, with the guts to hack through the petty obstacles that "men committed to a failed political and economic past" throw in their way. "He believes that what is good for him must also be good for Italy," says a supporter. Berlusconi is a super-patron: every Forza Italia voter, wishfully at least, a mini-client.

So what is at risk if the Cavalier succeeds, if he continues to dodge law suits until they all die of old age, if he rules for a full term and then, as has been hinted, goes on to become the first incumbent of a new, powerful Italian presidency?

What Berlusconi, for all his grand scale, does not encompass – what, because of the trajectory of his spectacular, tainted career, he specifically shuts out – is the notion of citizenship as something broader and deeper than the pursuit of individual and family happiness. Berlusconi is unlikely to be as rash as to say, after Thatcher, "There is no such thing as society." But that is the message, in the end. There are powerful individuals, there are close families, there are loyal retainers and powerful patrons. The rest is mere ideological flim-flam. At heart it is a deeply cynical, pessimistic creed.

But unless an opponent steps up who can articulate the concepts of citizenship and society with a great deal more vigour and conviction than the present bunch, Berlusconi looks well set.