Because I only wear ties when I really must, I kept a few and would bring the rest as gifts when meeting prime ministers in other countries. Over the years, however, it increasingly transpired that these men had also met Berlusconi and received their own Marinella. They would respond with a Berlusconi anecdote, which invariably included a very good joke and some useful advice, delivered in his exuberant manner with the happy smile of a lifelong optimist.

That was the secret of Berlusconi. For, in spite of its beauty, Italy is a country of pessimists, while Berlusconi always believed that something good was waiting for him just round the corner — and, for decades, there was.

Berlusconi never had to climb Disraeli’s greasy pole to become Italy’s prime minister. When the moment came in 1994, Berlusconi simply went on his three television channels to call for mass support for his brand-new Forza Italia party, which he readily obtained from a frightened electorate. All the moderate parties had collapsed, and a takeover by the Communists, who had renamed themselves the Democratic Party of the Left, seemed imminent.

The cause of this chaos was the Mani Pulite investigative campaign started by Antonio di Pietro, a then-unknown prosecutor who used Italy’s unique and abusive system of “preventive detention” — which allows prosecutors to imprison people without any evidence, ostensibly to fight organised crime — to lock up politicians and make them talk. Di Pietro was soon imitated by other prosecutors across the country: by the end of 1993, more than 4,000 elected officials at every level of government had been investigated or remained under investigation, with others released only if they denounced a higher-level official or major business figure.

Because suspects could be re-arrested once the original time limit had expired, a number of prominent politicians and businessmen killed themselves in prison — including, in July 1993, Gabriele Cagliari, the head of the ENI oil company, Italy’s largest enterprise. This was a great shock to an already demoralised political and business establishment. Everyone at the top knew Cagliari personally, as I did myself (I went with him to Leningrad, as it then was, to negotiate with mayor Sobchak and his German-speaking foreign affairs director Vladimir Putin).

It was in this context that Berlusconi founded Forza Italia. A few months later, on 11 May 1994, he won enough seats in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate to form a government. At first there was promise: it tried to initiate liberalising reforms of Italy’s highly deformed state-directed economy. But before it had made much progress, Berlusconi fell from power. What was left of Italy’s political and business establishment could not accept that the upstart, incurably lower-middle-class Berlusconi was the country’s political leader — and by January 1995, he was intrigued out of office, with president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro engineering the defection of some of Berlusconi’s new allies.

There was no new general election because Scalfaro contrived a regrouping of parties that formed a new government under the technocrat Lamberto Dini. But Berlusconi’s party faithful remained in control of regional and local authorities across Italy, and its parliamentary votes were still needed. This yielded real power, which was often used to favour Berlusconi’s widespread business interests, but also to promote the liberalisation of Italy’s state-heavy economy. It eventually yielded tangible benefits, including the transformation of the decrepit money-losing Poste Italiane into an efficient modern service that is still present in every village.

It was not, however, until June 2001 that Berlusconi had enough votes to be made prime minister again and form Italy’s longest serving government since the Fifties. Over the next five years, the country’s economy was further liberalised, and its defence strategy, particularly after 9/11, strengthened. Even before then, under the influence of Francesco Cossiga — who was a real security expert while variously serving as interior minister, prime minister and president — Italy had taken firm measures in response to its own Red Brigades domestic terrorists. But Berlusconi’s decidedly pro-American and pro-Israel stance induced him to do even more, palpably strengthening the government’s resolve to prevent, and not just “fight”, terrorism like every other country. The result, 22 years later, is that while Italy’s Muslim population has continued to increase and its borders remain porous, not a single person has been wounded, let alone killed, by an Islamist terrorist on Italian soil since 9/11.

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This was the Berlusconi that I dealt with in those post-9/11 years. Not Berlusconi the energetic playboy, who at different times kept an entire harem of young girls to be made available to visiting political leaders who were so inclined, as most were; not Berlusconi the businessman, who continued to watch over his many different businesses while managing state affairs; but rather Berlusconi the industrial executive who had learned that sometimes the chief executive must engage with the most minute details to do his job — and there was nothing facile or irresponsible about that Berlusconi.

In many ways, his final government between 2008 and 2011 was a tale of personal decline, culminating in the peculiar circumstances of his downfall. He was neither deposed by a cabal of rival party leaders nor by the treachery of members of his coalition, but by his own minister of the treasury and Italy’s president. To avoid Greece’s fate, Italy had to raise taxes just enough to persuade investors that it would control its public spending. But Berlusconi refused. In fact, he refused to look even at the numbers his finance minister was proffering; he was then in his maximum harem phase, with a dozen young girls housed in a luxury dormitory from which they were ferried to attend his after-dinner entertainments.

After that, his leadership waned, never really recovering even after he gave up his harem to marry a new wife. By the time he died on Monday morning, Berlusconi had led several lives, mostly rather well, and always in great part successful.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

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It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

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But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

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The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

The latter had made his intention to become president rather clear: Draghi’s approval ratings as Prime Minister are falling, and likely to worsen as the country’s post-pandemic social and economic crisis unfolds and opposition to draconian Covid measures grows; he was, in effect, hoping to pass on that buck. Moreover, from the highest chair in the Italian state, he would have been able to oversee and steer any government for the next seven years.

Yet his odds faded as politicians failed to agree on a replacement prime minister with sufficient support or clout to see the government through to the end of the parliamentary term in 2023, thus raising the prospect of early elections — something hardly any MP wanted, for obvious pecuniary reasons. At that point, after a few failed attempts by the parties of the Right to gain support for a joint candidate, all the major parties (with the exception of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) opted for plan B and overwhelmingly re-elected Mattarella.

He represents the best possible outcome for the Italian and Euro-Atlantic establishment, if not for Draghi himself: the Draghi government will remain in place until the next elections, with a staunch defender of the status quo in the role of president.

From the establishment’s perspective, it also represents a win-win scenario for 2023. If a Right-wing coalition fails to secure a majority, they will be forced to find an agreement with other parties on a new “government of national unity”, much like the current one — and Draghi would be the most obvious candidate to head it. At the same time, if they were to succeed in securing a majority, they would still need a president capable of “vouching” for a Right-wing government and safeguarding it against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — and Draghi would, again, be the most obvious choice. In that case Mattarella could step down, citing old age (he’ll be 81 next year), and pass the ball the Draghi.

That said, another positive unintended consequence of the election — again, from the establishment’s perspective — is to have made the prospect of a Right-wing majority in 2023 even less probable. The Right-wing alliance — Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi — is more fractured than ever, and some even wonder whether it still exists. Berlusconi is no doubt furious at the other parties for not supporting Forza Italia’s candidate, Maria Elisabetta Casellati, the President of the Senate, in the secret of the ballot box. Meanwhile, Meloni chastised Salvini’s decision to support Mattarella, tweeting “I can’t believe it”.

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Indeed, it was the Democratic Party (PD), the main sponsor of the Draghi-or-Mattarella ticket, which once again came out on top, confirming itself as the real power broker of Italian politics — the party “that never wins an election but is always in power”, as the joke goes. As for the Five Star Movement, which has gone from being an anti-establishment party to an establishment wannabe, it is heading for an internal showdown: Giuseppe Conte, former prime minister and leader of the party, failed to whip up support for the unlikely choice of Elisabetta Belloni, head of Italy’s secret service; meanwhile, Luigi Di Maio, the party’s true éminence grise, was working behind the scenes to reconfirm Mattarella.

Yet on a deeper level, Mattarella’s re-election represents a failure of the entire political system, a choice that confirms the fundamental powerlessness and futility of Italy’s political parties, and of parliament more generally, and their existential fear of anything that actually resembles true politics; that is, a situation where they are called to make actual high-stakes decisions. The pathological infantilism of Italy’s political class is the result of 20 years of external constraint — that is, of the country being essentially managed by outside forces, in particular the European Union.

Political parties are well aware of the fact that, even if they manage to secure a majority in parliament, they lack all the “normal” instruments of economic policy necessary to actually steer the economy in one direction or the other, since these have all been ceded to the EU. Over time, this has created an enfeebled political class, which wouldn’t have the guts to make high-stake decisions — à la Brexit, so to speak — even if if had the means to do so. All of which explains why, in times of crisis, Italy’s political parties tend to pass the buck to technocrats such as Draghi and to the technocratic apparatuses of the state — such as the presidency — by having the latter take responsibility for policies, usually decided at the supranational level, which the parties don’t want to take responsibility for (but for which they can’t conceive an alternative).

It’s a TINA mentality on steroids, which is shared by the “progressive” civil society from which most of the support for establishment figures such as Draghi and Mattarella comes from. We’re talking of a relatively well-off minority that is terrified of anything that seems to threaten what they perceive to be “normality” — be it the rabble-rousing economic populists of the post-crisis years, the Eurosceptics or, today, those critical of vaccine mandates. Paradoxically, progressives have become so terrified of change that they have effectively become the most conservative bloc of Italian society, and the greatest supporters of anything and anyone upholding the status quo.

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Mattarella, with his sleepy, reassuring gaze, is the living embodiment of this comforting “normality” — and indeed enjoys widespread popular support for this very reason. By the same token, his re-election perfectly epitomises the transformation of the president’s role in the past few decades, and even years, from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the EU’s treaties and rules.

In 2018, for instance, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government in January 2021, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Giorgio Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier.

And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency. If one thing is clear, it is that Mattarella’s re-election will further strengthen Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country — now redubbed “Draghistan” by his critics — as the prime minister knows perfectly well that Mattarella won’t raise any issues of constitutionality in regard to his policies.

The Draghi-Mattarella regime exemplifies in many ways a disturbing evolution in Italy’s long-standing reliance on technocrats: what Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti have dubbed technopopulism, which combines populist rhetoric to represent “the people” with technocratic claims to possess the necessary competence, experience and authority for translating its will into policy.

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Draghi, for example, recently painted himself as “a grandpa at the service of the state, with no particular aspiration” — that is, a common citizen who simply has the best interest of the nation at heart, a rather surreal claim coming from a former central banker who is considered by many to be “the most powerful person in Europe” and who is pursuing a very clear neoliberal political-economic agenda. In a similar vein, Mattarella stated that he had “other plans” but that he was willing to put his wishes aside and place himself once again at service of the nation, in what has been painted by the media as proof of the President’s supreme sense of selflessness, devotion and self-sacrifice.

This technopopulist mixture of technocracy and demagoguery is deeply worrying, and is at the root of Italy’s slide into autocracy — characterised by the centralisation of all major decisions in the hands of Draghi himself, the embarrassing level of government cheerleading by the media, and the silencing of any dissenting voices. That Twenties’ whiff just gets stronger and stronger every day. And with Mattarella in power, it doesn’t look like it will disappear soon.

It is generally believed that the Italian president performs a purely ceremonial and symbolic role, and throughout most of Italy’s life as a republic this has been largely the case. Italy, after all, is supposed to be a parliamentary democracy, with the government dependent on the confidence of the elected legislature.

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

It’s not, therefore, an inconsiderable source of power — especially in times of crisis, when the political system is incapable of delivering viable solutions and the president’s role tends to “expand”. Given the quasi-permanent state of political and economic turbulence that Italy has been mired in for at least a decade, it’s no surprise that the president today has evolved into a full-blooded political actor, with the power (and willingness) to intervene in the country’s decision-making process.

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But this transformation has been long in the making, and can be traced back to Italy’s gradual integration into the European Union and the euro, beginning in the early Nineties. For any country, membership of the euro means that the role of government — and therefore of parliament — increasingly becomes that of rubberstamping often unpopular economic decisions taken at the European level. This has inevitably entailed a process of state reconfiguration involving the strengthening of executive and technocratic powers at all levels, including that of the president, and the consequent marginalisation of parliament. Typically, this is presented as a necessary precondition for the swift and efficient implementation of the kind of economic policies enforced by the EU: fiscal austerity, wage moderation, and pro-market liberalisations and privatisations.

Once the choice was made by Italy’s elites to join the euro, it also became necessary to defend their decision from any possible popular-democratic challenges. And so the president’s role was transformed in another way: from guarantor of the constitution to guarantor of the country’s “international obligations”, in particular those to EU treaties and rules. Finally, the transfer of economic prerogatives to the EU meant that political parties, even if they managed to secure a majority in parliament, increasingly found themselves lacking the economic tools necessary to maintain societal consensus.

A system of quasi-permanent social and political instability was born, with the president adopting an increasingly “activist” role in the name of “stability” and “governability”. In short, Italy’s euro membership effectively set in motion a unique case of institutional transition from one form of democracy to another: from a parliamentary regime to a de facto presidential regime in which the legislature performs a marginal role.

This became particularly evident under the double term of Giorgio Napolitano (2006-2015), which coincided with the turbulent era of the post-financial crisis fallout. During that period, Napolitano became the “quiet powerbroker” of Italian politics, with critics referring to him as “Re Giorgio”, or King George. It is generally accepted, for example, that Napolitano played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in the “international coup” — involving, among others, the Bank of Italy, then-president of the ECB Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy — that led to the downfall of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his replacement by technocrat Mario Monti, personally chosen by Napolitano himself. Monti’s government was widely referred to as “a government of the president”.

Napolitano’s successor, outgoing president Sergio Mattarella, followed in his footsteps. In 2018, following an alliance between the Five Star Movement and the League, the two parties, as required by the Italian constitution, submitted their choice of government ministers to the president for approval. Yet their proposed economic minister, Paolo Savona, was vetoed by Mattarella due to his euro-critical stance, forcing the two parties to opt for the more status quo-friendly Giovanni Tria. As the law experts Marco Dani and Agustín José Menendez noted at the time, this would seem to point to the existence of “a form of ‘convention’ according to which political parties or coalitions that are critical of the existing economic and monetary arrangements within the eurozone cannot get into government. Or, more accurately, they are entitled to govern [only] in a tamed form”.

More recently, when Matteo Renzi pulled the plug on the Giuseppe Conte’s second government last January, Mattarella refused to dissolve parliament and call for early elections, instead working behind-the-scenes to ensure Conte’s replacement by Draghi, much like Napolitano had done with Monti a decade earlier. Indeed, according to several sources, Mattarella and Draghi were directly involved in the machinations that led Conte to step aside, with Renzi eventually moving away only once he had obtained reassurance from them that the former central banker was ready to step in.

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And over the past year, Mattarella has gone out of his way to vocally defend practically every policy of the Draghi government, including the more legally and constitutionally shaky ones — such as the introduction of vaccine passes and a de facto vaccine mandate, as well as the maintenance of a semi-permanent state of emergency and the strengthening of Draghi’s authoritarian and anti-democratic grip on the country. In other words, the president today no longer even pretends to be a neutral arbiter of the constitution. It’s not only taken for granted that he plays a deeply political role, but indeed the Italian elites increasingly expect him to do so: to use his king-like powers to uphold the status quo and keep “the barbarians” at bay, be they euro sceptics or vaccine sceptics.

In light of the above, the importance of the upcoming presidential election comes into sharp focus. With general elections scheduled for 2023 (and the possibility of a Right-wing majority), an unfolding post-pandemic social and economic crisis, growing opposition to draconian Covid measures, and a structural reform agenda which the EU expects Italy to implement in exchange for the meagre Next Generation EU funds, it’s clear that securing a man of the establishment in the role of president is essential for Italy’s pro-EU elites. Long before the pandemic, Draghi was seen as the natural successor to Mattarella. But his appointment as prime minister last February has made a potential transition more complicated.

If Draghi were to be elected president, the parties that make up the coalition government would have to agree on a replacement prime minister to see the government through until the end of the parliamentary term in 2023. However, it is widely believed that without Draghi it would be very hard to ensure the survival of the current “government of national unity”, which includes practically all parties except Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. And since no one (except maybe Meloni, who is currently topping the polls alongside the Democratic Party) wants to go to early elections — and also because dissolving parliament before next September would mean that MPs would lose their hefty annuity pensions — in the secret of the ballot box many MPs might choose to vote down Draghi.

In the unlikely event of early elections, it’s very hard to fathom what the scenario could be: with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia now closer to the liberal-centrist Democratic Party than to its formal allies, the League and Brothers of Italy, securing a Right-wing majority might prove difficult. This opens up the prospect of yet another “technical” or “national unity” government, overseen by Mario Draghi, now in the role of all-powerful king-president.

And this scenario isn’t entirely implausible even if elections aren’t held until 2023. Even for those parties still betting on securing a Right-wing majority at the next elections, there would be a clear advantage in having Draghi as president: the “approval” and “supervision” of the former ECB leader would prove essential in safeguarding the government against any backlashes from financial markets or the European institutions — a fact that in itself says a lot about the democratic implications of euro membership.

Draghi himself recently signalled that he would be willing to become president, and explained that parties shouldn’t worry about future governments straying from the path of neoliberal righteousness: “We have created the conditions for the work to continue, regardless of who is [in government]”, Draghi said, essentially confirming that elections are of relatively little important these days, since the decisions that matter are taken elsewhere, namely in the technocratic apparatuses of the state charged with implementing EU dictates. Whether this will be enough to reassure MPs remains to be seen. Draghi’s election is not, for now, a foregone conclusion.

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Italy's vaccine passport power grab

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Another option would be for Draghi to continue serving as prime minister until the end of the current parliament in February 2023. That would allow him to oversee the initial implementation of the EU’s reform agenda while a coalition of parties — potentially comprising the PD, the Five Star Movement, other smaller parties, and maybe even Forza Italia — work on a political platform that would furnish Draghi with a new majority in the next general election. In this case, it’s hard to predict who the next president might actually be. The only person actively campaigning for the election is Silvio Berlusconi, who has always dreamt of becoming president. But it’s unlikely that such a divisive personality will muster the broad support needed to become president.

Some have also posited a “creative” solution to get Draghi elected president while saving the current government: electing Mattarella for a second mandate until 2023 and then have him step down for old age and pass the ball to Draghi. Indeed, in a telling demonstration of just how desperate the Italian establishment is, opera-goers at Milan’s La Scala theatre recently greeted President Sergio Mattarella, who was in the audience, with chants of “bis” and “encore”, imploring him to serve another term.

It was proof that whatever happens in the upcoming presidential election one thing is clear: Italian democracy has become a largely elitist affair, in which warring factions of the establishment vie for power, while the majority of citizens don’t even bother to vote anymore. It’s no surprise that global elites today look to Italy as a model – The Economist even went as far as crowning Italy “country of the year”. Many of its citizens, however, would beg to disagree.

The interview, understandably, caused pandemonium after it was published — as Italian media piled into Berlusconi, the fascist vilifier of the country’s heroic justice warriors. Il Cavaliere — The Knight, as Berlusconi is known — responded by telling the world that the signori inglesi had got him drunk on champagne; in reality, he had forced us to drink ice-cold lemon tea.

Berlusconi has always been a crazy and colourful figure, but outrageous as his pronouncements and behaviour have been over the years, no one would ever have accused him of being actually mad. Until now. In the latest development afflicting Italian politics, judges in Milan have ordered the four-times prime minister to undergo psychiatric tests to prove that he is not mad.

It is a move so bizarre that even many of his Left-wing critics are outraged. Writing in the Left-wing daily, Il Riformista, editor Piero Sansonetti described the ruling against Berlusconi as proof that Italy is not a democracy but a “judicial dictatorship”. Even former centre-Left prime minister Romano Prodi sided with the man who for so many years was his principal political enemy, and pronounced that it was “yet another example of Italian madness”.

The court order demanding that Berlusconi’s sanity be tested came during his ongoing trial in Milan, already in its seventh year with feasibly another five to run — by which time he will be 90. The multi-billionaire is accused of bribing a string of young women with €10 million (£8.6 million) in cash, plus cars and flats, in return for their false testimony at a previous trial on what took place at his famous “Bunga Bunga” parties in 2010; which his accusers said were sex-fuelled romps but which, according to him, were elegant dinner parties.

But, last month, after Berlusconi successfully postponed several hearings on the grounds that he was medically unfit, the prosecuting judges sought a court order to force him to undergo a medical examination, as well as a perizia psichiatrica illimitata (unlimited psychiatric assessment).

It is no secret that the one remaining political ambition of Il Cavaliere, who turned 85 this Wednesday, is to become Italy’s next president when the incumbent Sergio Mattarella’s mandate expires in January. All he needs is the majority of parliamentarians to vote for him.

Sansonetti, editor of Il Riformista, is a former member of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) — the largest communist party in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc — and no friend of the free-marketeer Berlusconi. Yet even he wrote that the aim of the decision was to prevent Berlusconi from becoming head of state: “The judges said to themselves: with a psychiatric examination we block everything. Either he does not accept it, and then we win the trial, or he accepts it, we get him declared mad and his dream of the Quirinale [the presidential palace] is dead.”

In particular, he urged fellow Italian Left-wingers to stop their traditional applause for the judges’s crusade against Berlusconi, which has lasted nearly three decades and which Sansonetti describes as an “authoritarian assault” on democracy.

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At the heart of the current trial lie allegations of bribery to cover up what Berlusconi allegedly got up to with then 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer Karima El Mahroug, known as Ruby Rubacuori (“Ruby the Heart Stealer”). Along with other young recipients of Berlusconi’s generosity, she claims that any money, cars or flats he handed over were “gifts”.

In Italy the age of consent is 14 — but it is a criminal offence to pay for sex with a girl under the age of 18. Nevertheless, at the first Ruby trial in 2014 Berlusconi was acquitted on appeal of paying for sex with a minor, on the grounds that he did not know that she was under 18. Berlusconi was also acquitted of abuse of office.

Ever since Berlusconi became a politician in 1994 — to “save Italy from Communism”, as he put it — the country’s prosecuting judges have pursued him without respite. He insists that he is no saint but nor is he a criminal, and that he is the victim of Left-wing judges whose nickname is Toghe Rosse (Red Cloaks), determined to use their extensive powers for political ends.

Italian judges are not like English judges. They are part of the Magistratura, a state institution that is separate from the legal profession. They train as judges, not lawyers; they investigate, prosecute and sit in judgement. And like every institution in Italy, theirs is highly politicised.

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Over the course of his political career, Berlusconi claims he has had to face thousands of court hearings. But such a judicial blitzkrieg has not had a lethal effect on his political career, because so many Italians believe that he has been the innocent victim of a judicial witch hunt. It also failed because Berlusconi has only been convicted once — in 2013 — for tax fraud involving his media empire, for which he was not legally responsible at the time of the offence. He received a four-year prison sentence, but this was commuted to one year’s community service, which was mainly spent playing the piano in an old people’s home.

So even though forced to resign as prime minister in 2011, and even though Forza Italia these days is a mere shadow of its former glory, and he’s been banned from public life for five years, Berlusconi really does have an outside chance of becoming Italy’s next head of state, despite his age and poor health. As for the judicial campaign against him, this has only helped his cause — but not if court-appointed psychiatrists get the chance to declare him insane.

That’s why, rather than risk the psychiatrists, knowing “only too well what the outcome of this unjust trial will be”, he has taken what would be regarded as a suicidal or insane decision in most civilised countries: to be tried in his absence. This means that he is likely now to be found guilty, but given his age he will not go to jail — and a conviction will turn him once again into a martyr.

Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the Right-wing daily Libero, wrote that without doubt Berlusconi has been persecuted by the judiciary, but added: “There is no need for an assessment to establish if Berlusconi is mad. Berlusconi is mad, anyone who has achieved what he has achieved cannot be anything else.”

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Ironically one of Berlusconi’s favourite books is Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) which he used as a manifesto of sorts when he first burst onto the political scene in early 1994 with his new party — Forza Italia — and became prime minister after its shock election victory just a few months later.

At Forza Italia’s first party conference, just before the election, Berlusconi spoke at length about how this book should inspire the new party. In the preface to an Italian edition, he wrote: “What fascinated me about the work of Erasmus was in particular the central thesis of madness as a vital creative force: the more his inspiration springs from the depths of the irrational the more original is the innovator. Revolutionary intuition always makes itself felt when it manifests itself as void of common sense and truly absurd… True and genuine wisdom is thus not found in rational behaviour, which is necessarily complicit with the normal and thus by definition sterile, but in in far-sighted, visionary ‘madness’.”

With that in mind, it is probably just as well that Silvio il Magnifico — as his sympathisers once called him — decided not to subject himself to the psychiatrist’s couch.

In America, questions about President Trump’s actions have become central to the debate, not least because of the proximity of an election and the extent to which a strong economy had been the President’s best argument for re-election. But it is in Europe that the consequences could be most profound, even if it still too early to tell which political factions will predominate.

Perhaps the extensions of state powers in every European country will make the populace more open to authoritarian impulses from the political fringes, or perhaps this experiment with them will make the public more resistant to the accumulation of power by the state.

Of all the points of political interest relating to this crisis, one relates particularly to the series I have been working on for UnHerd on the European Right and the borders which delineate it from the far-right. Last month I looked at Sweden and the way in which a party of the extremes — the Sweden Democrats — had in the course of two decades come towards the political centre. But it is in Italy, currently the worst afflicted country by the coronavirus, that a spotlight is currently needed.

Italian politics is not the same as politics in other western countries, and this is as true of the extreme as the centre. In Germany today there are movements that regard their country’s history in the 1930s and ’40s as a proud one, but they are kept to the very farthest margins of the politics and in many cases are illegal. Though there are exceptions, almost anybody in Germany who looks towards the country’s fascist era as a noble one is granted the opprobrium they deserve and kept far from the centre of polite society.

Other countries have a different settlement, most clearly, perhaps, Spain and Italy. Whereas after 1945 Hitler-ism was vanquished not only on the battlefield but in the field of ideas, the same cannot be said of Mussolini-ism. There are reasons for this, not least the claim that among the last century’s fascist dictators Mussolini was a lesser beast than Hitler (admittedly a low bar).

For this reason among others, post-war Italy consistently sustained a far-right movement (as it did a far-left movement) in a way that would have been utterly unimaginable, not to mention illegal, in post-war Germany. A view persisted on the Italian Right that their brand of Fascism would not have gone so badly if it had not been for Hitler dragging Mussolini in a bad direction.

Because of these historical differences, in Italy ‘fascism’ and ‘far-right’ are not such excommunicable offences as they are in the rest of western Europe. As recently as 2003 the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made exculpating remarks about Italy’s wartime dictator and ten years later praised Mussolini as having been a good leader.

By this point, however, there was one element of Mussolini’s record which Berlusconi was wise enough to condemn without caveat, the passing of anti-Jewish laws. This was not an example of moral or political leadership on Berlusconi’s part, for by then even on the Italian far-right there had been some shift in attitude towards the past.

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In the 2000s a figure who looked set to go all the way to the top in Italy, Gianfranco Fini, made one of the most interesting migrations in modern politics. During the 1990s Fini had been a member of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a party formed immediately after the war by supporters of Mussolini. In the 1990s Fini became famous — among other reasons — for his overt support for the wartime dictator, including his assertion that Mussolini had been the greatest man of the 20^th century.

But during the 2000s, as Fini rose through the political firmament (by then in the Alleanza Nazionale) he also changed, although as ever it is impossible to know what is opportunism and what is somebody’s political heart.

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2002, Fini (by then Deputy Prime Minister in one of Italy’s permanently coalition governments) said: “As an Italian I must accept responsibility, I must do so in the name of Italians… The Italians bear responsibility for what happened after the legislation of the race laws in 1938 — and they must apologise.”

The statement caused an uproar in Italy, not least among supporters of Mussolini. But for a leader of a party seen as linked to Mussolini-ite politics the statement was crucial. A year later, on a visit to Israel, Fini cemented this shift, and also comprehensively disowned his previously laudatory statement about Il Duce.

Whatever Italian views about other aspects of Mussolini’s rule, Fini made clear that Mussolini had been wrong in several absolutely central things: in being an autocrat, in his alliance with Hitler and in his anti-Semitism. Although Fini’s career ended up dissolving within the decade in a blizzard of very Italian discoveries about a flat in Monaco, the fact that such a prominent figure from the far-right had made this move was a demonstration of a wider change in the country’s politics.

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Nevertheless, Italian politics remains open to neo-fascism in a way which is unacceptable in almost every other western country, and few people have been accused of it more readily or more frequently than the most recent leader on the Italian right, Matteo Salvini.

Unlike Fini and others, Salvini did not originate on the far-right. Indeed. when he started off in Milanese politics in the 1990s he was involved in the communist faction of the Lega Nord. His success came about through his recognition that the party which campaigned for the separation of northern Italy from the south should become a national movement. More than anyone else it was Salvini who in recent decades pulled off the feat of making a separatist party into a national, and indeed nationalist, one.

However this success would not have been possible had Italy not been forced to deal with the consequences of migration surge from North Africa throughout the 2010s — and virtually alone.

While the European Union professes to hold to a policy by which all member- states take an equal share of the burden on migration, in reality Italy, like other frontline states, has been forced to cope alone. During the 2000s they did so —among other things — via a policy of dark and rarely acknowledged bribes to the Gaddafi regime in Libya. So long as Gaddafi held back the boats (and his regime certainly did not hold them all back) Italy could cope.

But in the wake of Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 all of that changed, and soon boatloads of migrants were arriving every day on Italian islands like Lampedusa. Other European countries refused to pay for their share of this burden, and although the Italian population (spurred on not least by the Pope) were extraordinarily tolerant and sympathetic to the arrivals, nevertheless once the migrants got stuck on the islands or in major cities Italian public opinion began to shift.

Yet it was a major test of Italian tolerance; on top of the sheer weight of numbers, most came from culturally and religiously very different societies, as well as the criminality that the smuggling gangs brought into Italy. Salvini  addressed the issue, and his arguments resonated with the Italian public: not only the unfairness of Italy being forced to cope with this alone, but his insistence that the new arrivals did not share the traditions or ways of life of the Italian people.

And while it is true that the Lega (especially while it was a separatist movement) had ugly and neo-fascist elements, in many respects the party was not especially right-wing — it did not, for instance, have any especially austere attitude towards social welfare.  Yet it had an anti-intellectualism and instinctive nativism which made it easy to dismiss for a time.

Nevertheless, after the extraordinary events of 2015, when huge numbers surged into Europe, it was inevitable the party’s star would rise. After the election in 2018 the Lega formed part of an unlikely coalition government, with the Left populist Five Star Movement, and Salvini became Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister.

Although he is currently out of power (having attempted, unsuccessfully, to disband the coalition government last year) he remains the most dynamic force in Italian politics. Earlier this year, as the coronavirus began to enter Europe Salvini — like Marine Le Pen in France — called for his country’s borders to be closed. The rest of the political class called him a racist for suggesting such an unthinkable idea, and a few weeks later (after the severity of the crisis finally hit them) the same people who had condemned Salvini instituted the very policy.

Still he is regularly described in the foreign press as a ‘far-right’ politician, despite always having demonstrated a very un-Duce like respect for the democratic process (he quietly left office last September after his coalition broke apart). Partly this reflects the historical baggage of the Italian Right but much of it is misrepresentation by the press.

When last year the Italian Senator and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre called for a bill to be passed in the Senate setting up a commission to look into “intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred”, the Lega abstained from the vote, believing that it would be used to excoriate them on their immigration policy. Salvini himself currently faces prosecution in Italy for forbidding illegal landings while Interior Minister, so it is was not an irrational belief on the Lega’s part.

For abstaining in this vote Salvini and his party were accused of being anti-Semitic, yet he has been exceptionally outspoken on this issue. In January of this year I spoke alongside him on a panel in the Senate in Rome which called on the Italian government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. It is the definition that the British Labour party — among others — has stumbled upon and it is the definition which among other things makes plain that hatred of the Jewish state is itself a demonstration of anti-Semitism.

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If Salvini were a fascist or an anti-Semite it would seem an unusual thing for him to demand that the Italian government adopt a definition of anti-Semitism more stringent than they are currently willing to adopt. A definition which would — incidentally — almost certainly catch a number of ‘anti-racist’ but vociferously anti-Israel politicians on the Italian Left.

Fears of fascism in Italy are not unfounded, and the country does have parties and groupings whose attitudes towards the past and policies for the present should cause deep concern. Groups like Casa Pound, in this case named after the Mussolini-supporter and poet Ezra Pound, make no secret of their neo-fascism. To Salvini and the Lega’s Right there are parties which the rest of Europe would have a far bigger problem with.

Then there is Fratelli d’Italia, led by Giorgia Meloni, a former minister in Berlusconi’s last government. Meloni is a very Italian creation. Her public speeches and stances focus on her patriotism, her Catholicism and her support for the family – all popular things of course – but at heart her party is homesick for the fascist era.

When, a few years back, centre-left Jewish politician Emanuele Fiano (of the Partito Democratico) spoke in the Council of Deputies about an episode of anti-Semitism, Meloni and others objected to his speech by doing the saluto Romano (the fascist salute, with arm raised) in the chamber.

It was, and is, an action which it is almost impossible to imagine in any other European country, and a reminder that in Italy the past has not been fully or satisfactorily litigated, and that Italian politics remains as volatile as it ever was.