During the circus-like years of Silvio Berlusconi, Italians grew flinchingly accustomed to being the butts of the world’s jokes.
Will they have the last laugh?
They look toward America and wonder. Me, too. In Donald Trump, we have a version of their buffoonish former prime minister — a clown all our own. He baffles and appals much of Europe.
Here in Italy, he prompts an additional reaction: relief, even satisfaction, that another country is proving vulnerable to an emphatically tanned, flamboyantly randy and frequently ridiculous billionaire who makes promises he can’t possibly keep.
The Ferragamo is on the other foot.
“We do feel, partly, ha-ha-ha,” said Maria Valentini, a professor at a university just outside Rome. “It’s your turn.”
After I ended a telephone chat with an Italian architect I know well, he texted me an assessment from his assistant, who explained that under Berlusconi, “We felt like idiots. Now we feel better, thinking that in the US, they are being idiots squared.”
“It’s our revenge,” Roberto D’Alimonte, an Italian political scientist, told me. “Maybe America is becoming more like Italy.” He wasn’t entirely serious about the revenge. He was about America.
Italy is a fascinating vantage point for the upheavals of 2016, and not only because of the echoes of Berlusconi in Trump, which I’ve examined before.
Harsh nationalist sentiments are gripping Europe, and they demonstrate the pervasiveness of the anxieties that Trump is preying on and of the social and economic currents behind his rise. Austria nearly became the first Western European country with a democratically elected leader from the far right since the end of the Second World War. Britain is about to decide whether to exit the European Union.
There’s concern about a revival of fascism, as The Times’ Peter Baker recently noted.
And yet Italy, where Fascism was forged after the First World War, seems placid in the context of the Continent. The current prime minister, Matteo Renzi, is charting an unremarkable centre-left course.
“Italy has become some kind of oasis,” Patrizio Nissirio, a senior editor at the Italian news agency ANSA, told me. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.”
Italians complain that Renzi is uninspiring and unimaginative, but for now seem to prefer that to megalomaniacal and rash.
For them — for us — are these the only choices?
Make no mistake: Italy has problems. Desperate migrants by the thousands are trying to reach Sicily by boat from Northern Africa, and many are dying en route. In October, there will be an epochal vote about a constitutional change that would reconfigure Italy’s Parliament, and Renzi has staked his government on its success.
I arrived in Milan to be foiled by a train strike. I made my way to Rome just in time for a garbage strike. The city’s most recent mayor resigned in disgrace, and the campaign to pick his successor has been a morose one. None of the Romans I encountered envisioned better days ahead.
But they were glad not to be residents of France, where Marine Le Pen surges anew. Or of Greece, where everything has fallen apart.
Or of the United States. Berlusconi, they argued, looks tame next to Trump. They have a point.
To talk with them about the parallels is to remember how universal some types of gullibility are. We all crave saviours. And certain political conditions create certain political opportunists. It’s predictable, even when observers fail to predict it.
Berlusconi’s ascent was as surprising to many Italians in the 1990s as Trump’s was to many of us. “We realised that we didn’t know our own country,” said Raffaella Menichini, a longtime journalist with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. American journalists found ourselves in the same boat.
Berlusconi came to power by fashioning himself as a bold exception and antidote to the professional political class, which had just been racked by a widespread corruption scandal. He saw his opening.
He was a superrich businessman who knew how to feed the media — heck, he owned much of the media — and he pledged to use his entrepreneurial savvy to restore Italy’s economic dynamism, pushing the country forward by bringing it back to supposedly brighter days. He promised a “new Italian miracle”.
There was nostalgia in that vow, as there is in Trump’s to “make America great again”. Like Berlusconi, Trump deftly exploited profound disgust with politics as usual. And he understands, as Berlusconi did, that extreme bluntness mitigates extraordinary affluence, giving a plutocrat a bridge to, and bond with, the common man or woman.
Italians are fascinated by Trump. He’s prominent in newspapers, which tease out themes that connect him to Berlusconi, such as his objectification of women.
“The Italians look at Trump as a kind of Berlusconi,” said Marco Ventura, who was a spokesman for Berlusconi’s government when I covered it from 2002 to 2004. “But it’s too easy a comparison.”
And too easy on Trump. While Berlusconi had his rants and his scapegoats, warning Italians of overzealous judges and unrepentant Communists, there was little if anything on a racist par with Trump’s repeated vilifications of Mexicans and Muslims. He projected more affability.
“He always said that when you speak to people, you have to show that you have the sun in your pocket,” said Giuliano Ferrara, an Italian political analyst who worked in the Berlusconi government.
But Ferrara and other Italians noted a more crucial difference, and they did so in conversations before Hillary Clinton savaged Trump’s foreign-policy credentials in that belatedly fiery jeremiad last Thursday. Trump, they said, has the potential to muck up the world in a way that Berlusconi never could. So Americans’ indulgence of him is infinitely more dangerous than Italians’ of Berlusconi.
“Italy doesn’t claim to be the watchdog of the world,” Valentini observed. “You are.”
Domenico Minchilli, the architect I mentioned before, said Trump, as president, would have “100 million times more power than Berlusconi ever had”.
“So while everyone was making fun of him over here until about a month ago,” Minchilli added, “I think everyone’s now frozen in terror that this guy could actually make the giant leap to the Oval Office.”
I sense that to be true around Europe. I know it to be true in Italy, where any hunger for that last laugh ultimately pales next to a panic over its price.
Berlusconi could be dismissed as comical, by Italians as well as by the foreigners who mocked him. Trump can’t. He’s a taller man, with a longer stride. And what’s peeking from his pocket most definitely isn’t the sun.
— New York Times News Service
Frank Bruni is a writer and author of ‘Born Round’ and ‘Ambling into History’.
