How is it possible that Berlusconi is still on the political stage? Especially when Italy is facing dramatic economic problems—some of which stem from his years in government—and after all the embarrassing “Bunga Bunga” years? I’ll try to keep this simple. He’s still around because Italy doesn’t have a normal center-right; because its center-left, although polling higher than Forza Italia, has imploded into a fratricidal mess and been unable to capitalize on five years of decent government; and because he’s a known quantity in an election dominated by anti-establishment arrivistes like the Five-Star Movement and right-wing anti-immigrant politicians. During the campaign, Berlusconi has referred to himself as “usato sicuro,” or “used but in good condition,” the same term you see in ads for used cars. There’s a sucker born every minute. Although maybe not in Italy, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the West. [...]
Berlusconi as politician was born in 1994 from a political void—the collapse in a massive bribery scandal of the Christian Democrats and Socialists who had at that point governed throughout the post-war era—and today he fills another void. “If Berlusconi suddenly decided to retire from politics, the real true center-right, with the exception of Salvini, would not find a political expression. There would be a vacuum,” Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, told me. Berlusconi is still on the scene because of the large number of centrists in Italy who could vote right or left, and who in this election don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party but are not as far right as League voters. Where else can they turn? [...]
There’s also the possibility that if he gets the numbers for Forza Italia, they could drop their right-wing partners, the League, and form a grand coalition with the center-left Democratic Party, which is running on an opposing ticket with other left-wing parties. Berlusconi criticizes the Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi on the campaign trail—the left ruined the country and let in too many immigrants; Renzi governs by clicks and tweets are constant refrains—but he seems to have more fellow-feeling with Renzi than with Salvini, the leader of his party’s ostensible coalition partner, the League. A gossip magazine owned by a Berlusconi family company once ran a photo of the 44-year-old Salvini’s girlfriend kissing another man. In Italy’s political culture, the term for a sotto voce agreement, in which two rival politicians have a tacit agreement to drop their partners and team up after elections, is an “inciucio” (pronounced In-CHEW-CHO), which comes from Neapolitan dialect and implies a secret affair. “Berlusconi and Renzi are like two lovers looking to hide in the dark,” Ezio Mauro, a columnist for and former editor of La Repubblica, Italy’s leading center-left daily, which was an opposition paper when Berlusconi was in power, told me.
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