Since his first brief spell as prime minister of Italy in 1994, Silvio Berlusconi has had one run-in after the other with his country’s judiciary, and his legal worries have not stopped after his center-right coalition swept into power for the second time in May 2001. Berlusconi has been accused of fraud, false bookkeeping, tax evasion, bribery of finance officials, and perjury.
To be fair, none of these accusations have stuck. Berlusconi may well be completely innocent. But if that is the case, he sure has done everything in his power to keep anyone from finding out.
He has refused to yield control over the vast media empire that gives him a near-monopoly over public discourse in Italy, and he has used this empire to disseminate ceaselessly his view that his legal troubles are part of a left-wing conspiracy to remove him from power. Where journalists from state-controlled TV networks and newspapers have disagreed, or criticized him in any other way, they have often found themselves out of a job faster than they could say “free press.” His lawyers (who do double duty as members of Parliament for
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party) have been skillful in dragging out cases until the statute of limitation ran out. Where this was not enough, the government has not hesitated to custom-tailor legislation to suit their prime minister, for example introducing laws that enable defendants to have their trial moved to a different court if they believe the judges are biased against them, or reducing the maximum sentence for false bookkeeping and making it more difficult to press such charges in the first place.
But in early June, the legal system finally seemed on the verge of catching up with Berlusconi and it looked as though he was possibly just a few days away from being convicted of bribing judges in an attempt to foil a business rival’s takeover bid for a state-owned food conglomerate in the 1980s. But in a spectacular feat of eleventh-hour political magic, Berlusconi made his legal problems disappear: His government proposed legislation granting immunity to Italy’s five top public officials (needlessly to say, none of the other four have ever had legal problems) and Berlusconi’s coalition approved it in record time, putting their leader beyond the reach of the law once and for all (or at least until his term ends).
The prime minister hailed the new law as a major victory for democracy, announcing that it “limits the inappropriate use of weapons that are not a part of a democracy that is based on popular votes and free elections, free press and television, and nothing else,” and his spokesman and lawmaker Sandro Bondi agreed that the law “reinforces Italy’s democracy.”
Berlusconi’s political opponents are less enthusiastic about his latest coup. They see it as one more attempt by Berlusconi to protect Berlusconi, and thus as a threat to, rather than a reinforcement of, democracy. “All this has been done, not to protect the five top state officials but to protect the accused, Berlusconi,” Democratic Left leader Piero Fassino fumed, and Francesco Rutelli, leader of the center-left Ulivo coalition, warned even before the legislation was passed that Italy was in danger of “becoming a regime without even realizing it.”
Their frustration at their country’s prime minister is understandable, but their faith in the corrective powers of democracy leaves something to be desired. Because whether you trust his motives or not, the political logic of Berlusconi’s argument is rock-solid: In a democracy, it should be up to the electorate to decide to what extent they are willing to tolerate real or perceived misconduct on the part of their leaders.
Italy’s voting public will have to make some simple choices at the next election: Do they believe that Berlusconi is doing the job that they elected him to do? If not, the accusations against Berlusconi are irrelevant: He will not be re-elected. If the Italians do believe he is doing a good job, they will have to make a further choice: Do they think he is guilty as charged? If not, they will re-elect him. And if they do believe the accusations, they have a final choice to make: Do they mind being governed by a criminal for another five years? And while we may hope that they make wise and well-informed choices, ultimately, it does not really matter — what matters is that they have a choice at all. Even democracies have to confer substantial power and privileges to individuals in order to function properly, and no political system yet devised can keep these individuals from abusing their power while they are in office, immunity or no immunity. Democracy is simply a way to ensure that such abuses of power can be exposed and publicly discussed, and that the voting public can choose to end those abuses by taking away the power that they have temporarily granted the abuser. Democracy, in other words, does not guarantee the best of all possible governments; instead, it is no more — and no less — than a safeguard against the worst of all possible governments — one whose leader commits all the crimes that Berlusconi stands accused of, but who cannot be removed from power by the will of the people. (Anatol Stefanowitsch is a professor of linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany.)
