MAGGIE, NOT MUSSO

Nicholas Farrell says that Berlusconi is

a moderate liberal in a nation where the Left rules the roost

Predappio THE Italian Prime Minister and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, is a victim of one of the most dishonest propaganda campaigns in the history of modern politics. He has been demonised by the Left, which has controlled the culture of Italy since the war. Much of the world regards him as ruthless and corrupt, at worst a tyrant, at best a clown. And there is nothing that Berlusconi, or his apparently invincible media empire, can do about it.

Tuesday's general strike — the first in Italy for 20 years — was ostensibly in protest at government plans to modify a labour law called Article 18. This makes it virtually impossible for employers in Italy to sack anyone. That means, of course, that employers are reluctant to hire anyone. The black economy — where workers have no contracts and therefore no rights — accounts for one quarter of Italy's GDP. As any fool can see. Article 18 does not cure unemployment; it causes it.

But in reality the strike was not about this trivial little reform. It was the biggest push to date in the campaign by the Left to force Berlusconi out of government by means of the piazza rather than parliament, where it is hopelessly outvoted. This obsessive, unrelenting anti-Berlusconi campaign has created such a climate of hate in Italy that on 19 March descendants of the Red Brigades, the communist terrorists who created havoc in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, assassinated the government's adviser on workplace reform, Professor Marco Biagi — the architect of the modification of Article 18.

The professor was himself a man of the Left, though a Blairite rather than a Trotskyite. Indeed, he was one of the main supporters in Italy of the Blair–Berlusconi alliance which secured the deal on greater workplace flexibility at the recent EU summit in Barcelona. Three years earlier, the terrorists who killed him had shot dead his predecessor.

Abroad, meanwhile, the demonisation of Berlusconi continues apace. Last month it caused the Italian government delegation to withdraw from the Paris Book Fair, where Italy was guest of honour, after being mobbed by demonstrators waving placards saying 'Liberate Italy'. France's socialist culture minister, Catherine Tasca, had said that Berlusconi would not be welcome. The French press had been full of virulent anti-Berlusconi articles: Italy is ruled by 'a regime' (Nouvel Observateur) and Berlusconi signals 'the collapse of democracy' (Le Monde).

In Britain, it is much the same. In the Observer recently, Nick Cohen wrongly stated that one of the parties in Berlusconi's coalition is the MSI — a party which has not existed for quite some time — which he described as a home for 'undiluted fascists'. Perhaps it would surprise Nick to know that the UGL, the union which supports the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) — the highly diluted post-fascist party he was presumably referring to — took part in the general strike. Diluted fascists, like undiluted ones, arc very big on unions and workers' rights, which is why many fascists became communists at the end of the second world war.

The idea that Berlusconi himself is fascist is, of course, absurd. He is an unreconstructed liberal. His hero is not Musso; it is Maggie. He even keeps a photograph of her on his desk. In a speech before the general strike he emphasised the similarity between his battle with the unions and hers.

Even left-wingers know that the fascist smear won't stick. Their main charge — and they have made it stick throughout Europe and in the United States — is that Berlusconi is not a fit man to be Prime Minister because he owns three out of seven of Italy's

main television channels, and that now he heads the government he effectively runs the other, state-controlled channels.

Oh dear. Where does one begin? Anyone who actually watches Italian television cannot fail to notice that the three stateowned channels are dominated by the Left. This can be seen in their incompetence — no state-run news programme is complete without losing contact with reporters in the field — and in their bias: for example, live blanket coverage of another small anti-Berlusconi demonstration as if it were the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

True, Berlusconi has — as is his right as Prime Minister — made changes at the top; but these are unlikely to make much difference. It is rather like appointing a new chief executive in a place like Hackney and expecting things to change.

The fact is that, as Italians with eyes and ears know, Berlusconi's three channels are less biased than those of the state-run channels, and are usually of higher quality. Italy's best political-satire programme is on one of his channels. Recently, one of its reporters pounced on Vittorio Sgarbi, the art critic and culture minister who had been part of the Italian delegation at the Paris Book Fair, to present him with the golden tapir — its weekly dickhead-of-theweek award. To camera, Sgarbi whacked the reporter on the head with the tapir, screaming, `I refuse to take the tapir! I refuse to take the tapir!'

As for the corruption, Berlusconi has been acquitted of all charges against him except one, which was quashed on appeal. Anyway, it should be remembered that Italy is a very corrupt country. Berlusconi's predecessor as prime minister, Giuliano Amato, these days a leading light in the left-wing Ulivo coalition, used to be treasurer of the most corrupt party of the lot in the early 1990s: Bettino Craxi's socialists. As Giulio Andreotti, the seven-times prime minister acquitted in the end of charges that he was the Mafia's man in Rome, once said, 'To make trees grow you need manure.'

The Italians, who have been force-fed the Berlusconi corruption stuff for years, know much more about the ins and outs of it than do foreign journalists. Yet last May they voted in Berlusconi by the biggest majority of any of Italy's 59 prime ministers since the second world war. This week millions of them went on strike against his planned workplace reforms; they included those employed by his own television channels. But last May, millions more voted for him — 49.5 per cent of the electorate — and a raft of opinion polls published in the Corriere della Sera last week show that support for him remains virtually unchanged. If Berlusconi really were such a big threat to Italian democracy, and if he really did exercise such an iron control of the media in Italy, surely we would be hearing much less about it — not more.