With his death, he has shown us that he was not immortal, which is not little. Because surely there were people, starting with Berlusconi himself and a few thousand of his stalwarts, who had doubts on this matter. Since Benito Mussolini, Italy had not produced a son of the people so extravagant, so excessive, so popular and populist.
But if Mussolini died hanging from a butcher’s hook upside down in a Milanese gas station, vehemently cursed by the mob present there, the incombustible Silvio has been fired with a state funeral all over the city, no less than in the cathedral of the capital of Milan. Lombardy, the flags of the entire country at half mast.
Thousands of the sorrowful supporters who packed the Duomo square chanted anti-communism slogans, which, given the current complex global geopolitical situation, is nothing short of an anachronism. Or maybe not. In Europe, we are on the way to repeating, mutatis mutandis, and increasingly in a farcical version, as Karl Marx would say, the wayward twenties and thirties of the last century that saw the rise to power of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, in that order. Stalin is something else.
There is also no shortage of politicians, from one side or the other, who blow on the embers, still smoking, of that aberrant collective madness that was about to end our civilization.
But as Piergiorgio M. Sandri pointed out in this newspaper when he found out about the death of ‘the Alligator’, “Berlusconi’s political legacy in itself is nil”, only to add that “the social legacy, the narrative that he has installed in the customs, habits and family meals of Italians, this has been great”.
Berlusconi has left without revealing the origin of his immense fortune. From being a singer and entertainer on cruise ships, he suddenly became, as if by magic, a powerful businessman whose tentacles invaded the living room of even the humblest home in the Italian Republic.
It would be back in the eighties that a report on Berlusconi was published, by an Italian journalist whose name unfortunately we do not remember, which was not wasted. I was praying about a day in the life of a citizen – that of the journalist-resident of Milano Due, that colossal condominium built on the outskirts of Milan by magnate Berlusconi.
Step by step, he tells how everything he touches or does throughout the day is related to il Cavaliere. His apartment and his neighborhood belong to him, as well as the radio station he puts on when he gets up, the newspaper he reads in the bar on the corner, or the vulgar programs he watches on television when he returns home. Virtually everything he does or consumes bears Berlusconi’s imprint. There was no escape.
For a better understanding of the Berlusconi phenomenon, we recommend reading the first two volumes -the third, they say, is coming soon- of the biography that Antonio Scurati dedicates to Benito Mussolini. There is essentially the prototype of the jester populist politician who ignites the masses, as Charlie Chaplin (The Great Dictator, 1940), Bertolt Brecht (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 1941) or Thomas Mann (Mario and the magician, 1930).
But as much as we have been warned, the farce not only continues, but is on the way to turning politics into a grotesque and endless television space out of Berlusconi’s studios. ‘El Caimán’ is dead, yes, but his offspring promises to prosper beautifully for many years. In fact, we are already seeing it, here and everywhere.
