Italy without Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi will no longer preside at meetings of the Italian Cabinet. His resignation on Saturday night brings hope for the future in a country that, had it remained in the hands of Il Cavaliere, would have been plunged into bankruptcy, surely dragging the euro down with it. During recent weeks, as the Italian finances deteriorated, Berlusconi gave abundant signs that he planned to handle the crisis with the same mixture of vulgarity and frivolity he applied to everything else. The EU, and, finally, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate put an end to the most grotesque period in the recent history of Italy.

Berlusconi is going, but the damage he has done to democratic institutions and to the Italian economy will remain for a long time. His initial success in the 1990s, later repeated, was due not only to his near absolute control of the news media, private and public alike. The political system that Berlusconi has carried to inconceivable extremes of discredit was already fatigued when he offered himself as the solution. But, apart from deepening the discredit, his years in power brought a disconcerting novelty — that of proceeding to a literal inversion of all the values in Italian public life. With Berlusconi, corruption ceased to be a cause of embarrassment, and became a customary lever of power, almost evidence of political intelligence.

The Italy that Il Cavaliere leaves behind him is not only a badly governed country, but also has a battered democratic system and an economy on the edge of the abyss. This is not a balance sheet that will surprise anyone. Certainly not the Italians, nor the governments and leaders of other European countries, some of whom have not been above forming alliances with Berlusconi in connection with matters such as immigration. With these alliances, it might almost be said with these complicities, Berlusconi succeeded in acting as the spearhead on a range of measures contrary to democratic conceptions of human rights, which were later endorsed by the EU. Not even the Catholic hierarchy raised its voice against scandals that mocked the morality it preaches.

Now that he is outside the government, Berlusconi must face a number of charges for corruption, abuse of power and crimes involving minors, which he has so far managed to dodge by enacting several ad hoc laws that interfered with the process of justice. He did not succeed in this in the end, but Italy has not emerged unscathed.

The new government that President Napolitano has instructed Mario Monti to form, after consultations on Sunday, will first need to be confirmed by parliamentary vote, and then will have to address the task of rebuilding the country, in terms of political morality, the economy, and the basic institutions of the democratic system. It may be that Berlusconi and his style of government will turn out to have been only a parenthesis in the history of Italy. For the moment, they are the main problem that has to be solved.