Berlusconi: Italy under his spell

And polarised it. No one had ever so divided Italy and Italians, wrote Massimo Gramellini,a columnist for the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa.

His resignation on Saturday after 17 years as the paramount figure in Italian politics,just over half of them as prime minister,does not erase his presence from the political stage. He still has a powerful political party and owns Italys largest private broadcaster. But it marks the symbolic end of an era in which the media baron held the country under his spell.

A businessman who built a real estate and media empire,Berlusconi was first elected in 1994,casting himself as a moderniser and promising Italy a season of free-market reform. But after a career barely dented by colourful sex scandals and multiple corruption trials,it was the market that finally drove him from office,when Europes debt crisis hit Italy.

By personalising Italian politics and turning himself into a brandself-made,virile and wilyhe transformed Italys political and institutional cultures in ways that will resonate for years. In recent years,it was the sex scandals that most dominated the headlines,as reports emerged from judicial investigations of tawdry parties at the prime ministers private homes involving scores of young women and even a prostitute who went by the stage name Ruby Heartstealer.

Paolo Flores dArcais,a philosopher and editor of the left-wing monthly magazine MicroMega,said,He inverted everything so that those who criticised him were considered moralists. Its the world turned upside down.

Berlusconi entered politics in the wake of a bribery scandal that had brought down Italys postwar political order. I have decided to enter the playing field and to take up politics because I dont want to live in country that is not free,governed by immature political forces, he said.

Alexander Stille,the author of a book on Berlusconi called The Sack of Rome,said he represented something new. Berlusconi,already a celebrity,offered himself: no real ideology other than his own personal wealth.

It was a brilliant strategy,and it catapulted him into power. But his first term lasted only eight months,crashing when he lost a coalition ally. He was elected again in 2001,after delivering a magazine-sized volume,An Italian Story,to every doorstep in Italy. A masterpiece of self-branding,it depicted him as a self-made man.

The average Italian saw himself as Berlusconi,only poorer, wrote Gramellini,the columnist.

That image was rarely challenged,in the media he controlled. By the time he ran for office,in a country where most of the population watches TV news,he owned the three largest private television networks as well as popular supermarket tabloids and a broadsheet newspaper. Once in power,he also held sway over the state broadcaster,giving him a virtual monopoly on information. He had created a mass audience and transformed it into a political constituency.

Berlusconis 2001 victory,which dovetailed with the arrival of the euro,ushered in an era of political patronage that became known as Berlusconismo. Berlusconi developed close personal ties with Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Cables from the WikiLeaks trove released last year show that American and other officials were concerned about whether those ties also benefited his businesses.

On his watch,Italys growth stagnated,its debt ballooned to $2.6 trillion,about 120 per cent of the GDP,and Italy stumbled in international rankings of competitiveness and transparency. Then,as the financial crisis arose,his love life and his parliamentary efforts to postpone legal reckonings in several cases overshadowed any debate about the economy. He became equally known for his off-colour jokes and gaffes. In 2008,he called President Obama handsome,young and also suntanned.

Over the years,he was tried for tax fraud,bribing judges and other white-collar crimes. In each case,he was either acquitted,the conviction was reversed on appeal or the statute of limitations ran out.

Above all,Berlusconi was brilliant communicator. He told Italians want they wanted to hear,even if they did not believe him. Indro Montanelli,who died in 2001,a former editor-in-chief of Il Giornale,once observed of Berlusconi,Truth is what he says it is.

I think he did well for the country, said a businessman in downtown Rome on Saturday. Do you think he is the only one who slept with prostitutes and escorts?

For Berlusconi,the political was never far removed from the personal. When he lost his majority in Parliament,felled by a handful of his own lawmakers,a camera snapped a photo of a note on which Berlusconi had tallied the vote,circling the number 8,his losing margin,and writing beside it: traitors.