In my latest piece for UnHerd, I reflect on Berlusconi’s legacy and on his influence on my own political identity, from my early dabbling in left-wing politics in the early Nineties and the tragic violence of the anti-G8 protests in 2001 to my disillusionment with the obsessive and myopic anti-Berlusconismo of the Italian left. Ultimately, for all his many faults, Berlusconi tried to assert a degree of national autonomy — and that’s why the Euro-Atlantic establishment brought him down in 2011. Since then Italy’s politicians have morphed into mere implementers of foreign diktats. Meanwhile, the Italian left, by obsessively focusing on Berlusconi and his threat to democracy, ended up ignoring — or worse, embracing — the more significant structural trends that have been weakening Italian democracy and sovereignty for the past 20 years and more: the gradual erosion of sovereignty at the hands of the EU and later the euro; the growing power of the technocratic apparatuses of the state, such as the Bank of Italy and the President of the Republic; the undermining of Italy’s strategic interests by its supposed allies, exemplified by the Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011. Read the article here.
Thomas Fazi 