Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

94 Twenty-First Century Populism
The value attached to the moral qualities of family and professionalism is
another important feature of the populist rhetoric of the Forza Italia leader.
For Berlusconi this serves not just to pillory professional politicians, but also
to ensure that whoever is listening feels that he/she is on the same level as
the man promising a better future. In order to create this impression,
Berlusconi acts as if complicit with his audience, with the aim of appearing
as the only sincere and worthy interpreter of what the man in the street
thinks. Obviously, he knows his audience, and his celebration of the common
man’s virtues is targeted to tug the heart-strings not of an idealized
and abstract community − like that of the Padanian people evoked by the
Lega Nord − but of the ordinary public of shoppers and television viewers, i.e.
the ‘real country’ as opposed to the politicians, functionaries and bureaucrats
in the seats of power, the intellectuals in universities and newspaper
headquarters. Aware that the identity of Italians and their style of life have
been forged essentially on the basis of models proposed by the mass media,
Berlusconi deploys simple and clear language that the common man will be
familiar with from television, and which gives him the satisfaction of being
finally able to understand something of the obscure and unsavoury material
that is politics. This strategy is apparent in Berlusconi’s praise for the
common sense of ‘the real Italy, the Italy that works’, juxtaposed with the
‘chattering Italy’.
Completing the picture of Berlusconi’s populism are the concessions in
his speeches to rhetoric aimed at the weak, the abandoned, the unemployed
and the elderly – that is the most disadvantaged of the ‘common people’,
whom the parties and unions of the Left have abandoned in order to defend
the interests of those ‘insiders’ who are already protected. ‘To help those left
behind is a moral duty’ read the slogan printed next to Berlusconi’s smiling
face in one of the many huge billboards plastered across the country in the
run-up to the 2001 election, reminding us that ‘compassionate conservatism’
is not just an invention of George W. Bush. Indeed, it could not be
otherwise for a man who, in the course of the same campaign, attempted to
reconcile the seemingly contradictory self-images of the ‘businessman
President’ and the ‘blue collar President’, both at the service of the nation.
The importance attached to the values of the ‘little people’, however, does
not exhaust the range of Berlusconi’s expressions. Whether in front of an
adoring crowd or addressing Parliament, the leader frequently speaks of,
and to, ‘the people’. This is usually done with the aim of implying that
politics would be better were it to incorporate some form of direct democracy:
the state must serve the citizens and not vice-versa; the citizen must be
sovereign; ‘democracy will only return when we return to treasuring the
real will of the people’; sovereignty belongs to the people, who are its sole
possessors; and whoever ignores or tramples on the will of the people severs
the roots which nourish the contract uniting citizens. The recognition of a
‘demand for direct democracy’, for an immediate and direct bond between