Berlusconi’s legacy lives on beyond Italy’s borders

In a strange bit of synergy, both the indictment of former US President Donald Trump and the death of Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took place this week. Berlusconi was perhaps the OG of populist leaders whose political careers continued through a cascade of scandals and criminal cases.

Both are examples of how the weakening of mainstream political parties can open the field to charismatic outsiders with a populist streak.

In the early 1990s, Italy’s national “clean hands” survey revealed that widespread corruption had infected business, public works and politics, and found that the country’s political parties were largely funded by bribes. The two parties that had dominated Italian politics since the fall of fascism, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, fell apart after a wave of indictments. Just like almost every other established political party.

“The party system that was the anchor of the democratic regime in the postwar period essentially collapsed,” said Ken Roberts, a political scientist at Cornell University. told me a few years ago. “The result is a political vacuum filled by a populist outsider in Berlusconi.”

That conversation with Roberts in 2017 focused in particular on another country, where another corruption scandal opened the path to power for another right-wing outsider: Brazil, where an obscure lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro was just beginning to gain national appeal in the wake of the Carwash corruption investigation.

“I’m really worried that the whole system will collapse by cleaning it up,” Roberts said at the time. “I’m really afraid of what a Brazilian Berlusconi will look like.”

In another conversation this week, Roberts recalled that most analysts at the time were not taking Bolsonaro seriously. “But he started stirring, and my quote to you was anticipating his rise,” he said.

“I think it holds up pretty well over time,” he added.

A year after Roberts and I first spoke, Bolsonaro was elected president after running on a far-right platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage and full praise for Brazil’s former military dictatorship.

As his term was about to end, he warned for more than a year that he might not accept the results of the 2022 election if he didn’t win. When he lost, he made baseless claims of fraud. Eventually a mob of his supporters federal buildings overrun in Brasília, the capital, in a failed attempt to prevent the candidate who won the vote, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office.

Bolsonaro is now set to stand trial next week about his claims of electoral fraud.

Other examples of this pattern are not hard to find. In Venezuela, a series of corruption scandals created a power vacuum that Hugo Chávez easily filled with populist appeals, leading to an authoritarian government that by the time of are dead, oversaw a country beset by crises. In Guatemala, President Otto Pérez Molina forced a corruption investigation Out of office in 2015 he was replaced by Jimmy Morales, a charismatic television comedian with no political experience who used the slogan “neither corrupt nor a thief” as president. When the UN-backed group that had been investigating Molina also started looking at Morales, he said expelled from the country.

The United States has not had a massive corruption scandal that sent politicians to courtrooms and jail cells and decimated trust in their political parties. But, as I discussed in columns in April and May, Trump came to power after the Republican Party was severely weakened by other factors, including campaign finance laws that allowed big money donors to bypass the partyand the rise of social media meant it was party time no more gatekeeper for access to press and messages.

That kind of institutional weakness creates an opening for outside politicians who could one day be kept out of politics by robust political parties. But more specifically, it also favors a certain type of candidate, who has name recognition (perhaps a famous entertainer like Morales, a famous businessman like Berlusconi, or someone like Trump, who bridges both worlds), charisma, and a willingness to win. votes and headlines by embracing positions that would be taboo for mainstream candidates.

Unfortunately, it is rare that such politicians are also good at building new, strong institutions to replace those that their decline brought to power.

In Italy, Berlusconi presided and helped perpetuate decades of weak coalition governments and political unrest, not to mention the many corruption scandals he was caught up in. And that chaos seems to survive him.

“Even in death,” said my colleague Jason Horowitz, chief of the Rome bureau of The Times, wrote this week“Berlusconi had the power to shape the political universe and the ruling coalition of Ms. Meloni, of which his party, Forza Italia, is a small but critical pivot.”

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