The stage is set for act three of an Italian farce
'This is a wise country, a country that knows when a person is tired and has turned vicious, when it is time to turn over a new leaf.' That was the upbeat assessment of Walter Veltroni leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, just before Italy's recent national election. So what did the wise Italians do? They elected Mr Veltroni's adversary, billionaire buffoon Silvio Berlusconi, to a third term as prime minister.
To elect Mr Berlusconi once, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, may be regarded as a misfortune. To elect him twice looks like carelessness. But, to elect him three times is beyond a joke, for he is the most transparent fraud to have held high public office in a major European country since the second world war.
What can the Italians have been thinking? They were, I suspect, thinking that the situation is so bad that only a self-proclaimed miracle-worker like Mr Berlusconi might have the magic to fix it. He managed to turn himself into the second-richest man in the country; maybe he can do it for the rest of us. If the magic doesn't work, at least he's entertaining.
Mr Berlusconi truly is entertaining, in a crude sort of way. He is a compulsive clown, once making the sign of a cuckold's horns behind the head of a fellow dignitary in a group photo of national leaders. He rubbishes foreign cooking ('the Finns don't even know what prosciutto is'). He makes preposterous promises, like a month without taxes ('We probably wouldn't be able to do it because it would cost too much but, as you can see, we don't lack imagination in solving problems'). He claims his Latin is good enough to have lunch with Julius Caesar.
One wouldn't dwell so much on the clown-like behaviour if it were just the cover for a serious political programme, but there is none in sight. Having made a first fortune in property and a second in media (he owns Italy's three big commercial TV channels), he got into politics in the early 1990s mainly as a way of evading the bribery and corruption charges threatening to bring him down. So far, there have been 11 prosecutions brought against him, and both of his closest business associates have been convicted.
Much of the legislative effort during his previous two terms as prime minister was devoted to rewriting the laws to help Mr Berlusconi escape conviction: changing the statute of limitations, for example, so that the charges against him suddenly expired. For all his promises to bring a successful business tycoon's methods to the task of fixing Italy's ailing economy, he made few significant changes, and the slow decay of the Italian state and economy continued.
By now, it is getting very serious. The national airline, Alitalia, is about to collapse, and Italians were recently shocked by the news that Spain now has a bigger economy, despite having 15 million fewer people than Italy. They were even more startled to learn that the average income in Greece is now higher than in Italy. It is a very long time since the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s.
So why did Italians give this 71-year-old charlatan a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament in this election, especially when the worst of the decline happened during his previous time in office? Perhaps the best answer lies in something written recently by political scientist and opinion pollster Ilvo Diamanti: 'Italian society has been hit by a real 'collapse of the future'. Almost two out of three Italians believe that, in the near future, the young will have a worse social and economic position than their parents.'
This is despair. People in this frame of mind do not always make rational choices and, in choosing Mr Berlusconi, they are looking for magic. But he doesn't have any magic. And, after five more years with him at the helm - he has the majority to last a full term - it is quite likely that Italy will even have to bail out of the euro. The Italian state is slowly collapsing before our eyes.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
