Italy - Ciao, baby! Why Italy just can't say no to Silvio Berlusconi

Ronald Reagan was known as the Teflon president, but Berlusconi's ability to shrug off misfortune beggars such metaphors. Ten months ago, as I was preparing to leave Rome, Berlusconi seemed doomed. It was his wife Veronica that had done for him: her announcement last April that she wanted a divorce seemed to break the spell in which he had held his country hypnotised for years. Suddenly, it seemed, people began to see him for what he was. Veronica's comments about him frequenting under-age girls, her condemnation of the "trash" – buxom showgirls – he wanted to put up for election to the European parliament, her cryptic remark that "my husband is not well" – all this from the woman who had stood by her man stoically for nigh on 30 years, cast him in a new and ghastly light. He might be mega-rich, brilliant, energetic, charismatic – but what a creep! What an appalling character to have thrown your lot in with! And what horrors might that pregnant phrase "non sta bene" – "he's not well" – contain? What raptures of megalomania, sadism or psychosis might the unlucky Veronica have been privy to?

For years Berlusconi has behaved more like a Roman emperor than an elected Prime Minister, but in the autumn of his years the tendency has become even more extreme. But the dismaying element today is the extent to which his adversaries let him get away with it: the last person to land a blow on him was the unbalanced character who hurled a bronze model of Milan's Duomo in his face at New Year. No one could claim that Italy was buoyant with Berlusconi at its head. Even the sort of phoney and palsied recovery that Britain experienced after the crash has eluded it. Industrial output plummeted by more than 17 per cent last year, and the nation's public debt of €1,663bn is the third highest in the world. Add this to the sleaze piling up on all sides and one would expect Berlusconi to get a terrible drubbing in the coming polls. Yet that is unlikely to happen – and not only because of the feebleness of the opposition. As a new book spells out, Berlusconi has a hold over a huge swathe of his electorate, who will vote for him no matter what.

According to the Italian writer Curzio Maltese, in The Bubble: The dangerous end of the Berlusconian dream, ever since he entered politics Berlusconi has appealed, more or less openly, to the nation's millions of tax evaders. And this is one constituency that he has never disappointed.

Italy today is devouring its own entrails. Private affluence and public squalor; constantly shrinking budgets which inflict vicious blows on schools and universities and hospitals and museums while the entrenched gerontocracies which preside over them are untouched; talented and vigorous youth who flee abroad to find study and work opportunities in ever-greater numbers, while their less-enterprising contemporaries struggle to make ends meet in jobs with miserable pay and no security; organised crime which constantly extends its reach; fear and hatred of immigrants, cynically encouraged by politicians in the government: this is Berlusconi's dismal legacy.

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