Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“I am the most democratic man ever to be Prime Minister of Italy,” Berlusconi asserted as he bent the institutions of Italian democracy to his private needs. When he returned to office in 2001, he had ten trials underway, on charges of accounting fraud, bribery, and more. Over two terms in office (2001–2006, 2008–2011) he had dozens of ad personam laws passed to protect himself from prosecution. His claim that he was “the Jesus Christ of Italian politics” referred to his role as savior of the nation and his martyrdom by the leftist press and judiciary. Senate president Renato Schifani accused magistrates involved in a 2002 Berlusconi trial of instigating “a coup attempt.”39 Berlusconi and his party also beat the drum of Communist threat to stoke fear in voters, playing on nostalgia for Fascism’s law and order while whitewashing its violence. “Mussolini never killed anyone, he sent people into confinement to have vacations,” Berlusconi told Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell in 2003, referring to dank Fascist prisons on islands like Ponza where torture had been practiced.40