The preceding chapter dealt with the issues of entitlement and political affairs, but no work on these themes would be complete without considering a man who has not only become synonymous with inappropriate sexual behavior while in political power, but who has also used and thoroughly abused his country’s legal and media systems to shamelessly further his own personal interests. Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italian politics for nearly two decades, making “Berlusconismo” his own unique political brand. And, even though he spent much of that time actively undermining some of the most basic features of his country’s democracy, it was only the tremendous outside pressure exerted in the form of the Euro crisis that eventually removed him from power in November 2011. Between changing laws at the highest levels in order to free himself from prosecution and ultimately securing control of roughly 90 percent of the Italian media, it is a wonder that he still had time to socialize with women much younger than himself, even being accused of having sex with an underage prostitute. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, for the past two decades, Italy has been more a reflection of Berlusconi than Berlusconi has been of Italy, a feat attributable to his intensely narcissistic character.

BACKGROUND

To understand how he managed for so long to run his party – and Italy – like his own personal fiefdom, it is important to understand how he came to power in the first place and his appeal to the Italian public. Without delving too deeply into Italian political history, it is enough to note that postwar Italy was dominated by a communist ideology that appealed to the masses because of the horrors that characterized the wartime fascist system of Benito Mussolini. But when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and communism lost what was left of its already severely weakened appeal, the Italian people decided that it was time for their country to reinvent itself.