Why Berlusconi beat the ‘Italian Obama’ - - by Dr Dominic Standish
"Italian voters are so disillusioned by more than a decade of anti-corruption witch-hunting that they are willing to return to office the man who was described as the most corrupt of them all: Berlusconi. And second because it highlights the perils of personality politics, which should be a lesson to politicians across the Western world."
Berlusconi demonstrated that he still has some appeal in a country where political correctness is not as all-pervasive as it is in the US and some Western European countries. In the past Berlusconi famously compared a German politician to a Nazi camp guard, and he declared shortly after 9/11 that Western civilization is superior to Islam. During the latest election campaign, he proposed mental health tests for prosecutors who have attempted to convict him on corruption charges, stated that right-wing women are sexier than left-wing ones, and hailed a Mafioso who looked after his villa in the 1970s as a ‘hero’ for refusing to talk to police.
Although Berlusconi’s cultivation of personality politics was more successful than Veltroni’s Obama ripoff act, neither leader could mask the pervasive sense of stasis in Italian politics. The electorate was faced with two ageing representatives of Italy’s political old guard attempting to reinvent themselves as dynamic personalities.
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