There’s a great article in open democracy by Geoff Andrews, the author of Not a normal country - Italy after Berlusconi and The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure , which sums up much of recent Italian political history and explains what’s happening around Berlusconi and all these scandals.
Here’s a short extract
The crisis goes deeper than his relations with young women. On 21 May 2009, Berlusconi described the Italian parliament as “useless”, saying that only 100 MPs were necessary to get the business done and contrasting legislators unfavourably with businessmen. In February 2009, a court ruled that he had bribed the British lawyer David Mills to provide false testimony, even as he himself is protected from prosecution by parliamentary-immunity legislation passed by his own government. Berlusconi has offered no explanation for this. The pattern here of an absence of any commitment to democratic accountability by the country’s elected leader has led La Repubblica - which has done an exemplary job in pursuing the truth of Berlusconi’s actions - to issue a further ten questions for him to answer (see “Le dieci domande mai poste al Cavaliere” [14 May 2009] and “Le dieci nuove domande al Cavaliere” [La Repubblica, 26 June 2009].
At the same time, the government’s own attitudes to the media its does not control are problematic. Berlusconi has urged companies not to advertise in the weekly L’Espresso (a publication from the same media group as La Repubblica). His minister for culture and close ally Sandro Bondi has described La Repubblica as a “threat to democracy” - an extraordinary way to characterise the normal functioning of a newspaper in a free society. In addition, the director of the public broadcaster RAI - part of Berlusconi’s media empire - has declined to broadcast details of the claims against Berlusconi (something equivalent to the BBC refusing to cover the parliamentary-expenses scandal in Britain).
