In the early 1990s, the political scandal “Bribesville” led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, headed by Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party Forza Italia (“Go Italy”). Bettino Craxi’s political protégée promised the Italians a “clean, reasonable and modern country.” Instead, the media magnate turned Italy into the “sick man of Europe”: “a country still struggling between modernity and backwardness, between the need/will to change and the fear of losing some local or specific privileges.” Twenty years on, a new corruption scandal has emerged, and the country seems to have returned to its point of departure, in spite of Berlusconi’s dismissal as Prime Minister.
This is not just Berlusconi’s fault, as I discussed in an earlier post . After all, he was voted in by many Italians, even if his control over the media (the Berlusconi family owns several TV channels, a publishing house and national daily) suggest a certain degree of political manipulation. The problem is that there is a mindset where getting away with (bad) things is a kind of national sport. It relates to the diffidence of Italian citizens towards the state, as historian John Foot explains in Italy’s Divided Memory:
“T]he Italian state has been in the throes of a semipermanent legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by many Italians in terms of a ‘rational’ management of the state and the political system. They have, instead, been partly replaced by other, unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized patronage, clientelism, and informal modes of behaviour and exchange.”
This legitimation crisis is evident, for example, in tax evasion but also – on the part of the state – in the use of excessive violence against citizens during social conflicts. The most exemplary case was the G8 summit in Genoa, in 2001, when police killed a student activist, savagely beat up . . .
Read more: Italy: Still the Sick Man of Europe
