We are all watching the Silvio show

What are we to make of the news coming out of Italy? Showgirls are put up for parliament; Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister, pursues a controversial relationship with a teenage girl from Naples while undergoing a very public divorce; there are revelations of wild parties involving call girls; and photographs emerge of topless women and pantless politicians at Mr Berlusconi’s Sardinian villa. Certainly, it is the summer’s most entertaining political story and tends to be seen simply as confirmation that Italian politics is a kind of incomprehensible opera buffa. Yet while the details are lurid and often funny, it is also possible to discern the outlines of something rather horrifying with implications that extend beyond Italy. On one level, what we are seeing is a natural progression of the personalised form of government that Mr Berlusconi established in Italy 14 years ago, when he suddenly transformed himself from being Italy’s most powerful media baron into its prime minister. Mr Berlusconi’s power now exceeds that of any leader in western Europe. One would need to look to Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela for parallels. Mr Berlusconi’s antics are only comprehensible when considered in the light of a system that grants him total impunity. Earlier this year David Mills, a British lawyer, was convicted of taking a half-million dollar bribe from Mr Berlusconi’s company in order to keep the prime minister’s name out of investigations into his financial empire. Mr Berlusconi was spared prosecution in the same case by a law passed last year by his own government granting him legal immunity while in office.

This state of impunity, in turn, is possible only because of Mr Berlusconi’s near-total control of the Italian media. The prime minister owns the three largest private channels and indirectly controls the three public stations. As a result, his sex scandal has gone virtually uncovered on Italian television. Even as audio tapes of conversations between the call girl Patrizia D’Addario and Mr Berlusconi became available on the internet, the news division of Rai 1, the state broadcasting system’s biggest network, dismissed the story as mere gossip. Most Italian newspapers (with one or two notable exceptions) have covered it with great caution, far less extensively than many in Britain.

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