Ten years ago a dramatic and heartening revolution in Italy promised to change not only Italian but all European politics for the better. The magistrates who began an investigation into corrupt practices at an old people's home in Milan in 1992 eventually uncovered a system of backhanders so pervasive that the city was rechristened Tangentopoli, or the metropolis of bribes.
What the magistrates revealed, in Milan and elsewhere, led to the collapse of the Italian political establishment, and to what seemed at the time the likelihood of fundamental reform.
Outside Italy, the investigators were emulated by magistrates in Spain and France, with lesser but still important results and, it can be argued, they contributed to a new sensitivity to corruption across Europe that led in time to changes in other countries, such as Germany.
The hopes raised by the Tangentopoli revolution were not simply to do with cutting corruption in Italy but with the prospect of a more honest politics, not only in the monetary sense, everywhere in Europe.
Tangentopoli seemed one of the elements in a general process of renewal in both east and west. Released from the pressures of the cold war, the argument went, it was no longer necessary to compromise principles in the name of stability.
Italy was the extreme case of the politically fixed western country, in that the necessity of keeping the communists out of power by fair means or foul helped on the other deformations of democracy. But other west European countries also exhibited sclerotic symptoms, hence the proliferation of new ways, third ways and new approaches that European political parties proclaimed in the 1990s.
On the other side of what had been the iron curtain, politics was also reinvented. Such a diverse array of changes could not be seen as one movement but they did seem like boats rising on the same tide. A decade later, it can hardly be denied that the tide has ebbed. Nowhere more so than in Italy, where the first general strike for 20 years took place this week in protest against Silvio Berlusconi's plans to change labour laws.
Berlusconi first rose to power out of the crisis into which the corruption investigations plunged Italian politics, a crisis that brought down Bettino Craxi and Giulio Andreotti, the two surviving giants of the old system. It was ironic that an adventurer like Berlusconi, and one moreover with his own ties to that system, should be the beneficiary of these changes.
He was soon out of power but, sleeker and better organised, he recaptured it a year ago. He won because of the poor state of the other parties, but also because, assisted by his dominant role in both areas, he tapped the energies that could be transferred from popular sport and entertainment into politics. And he set his face against constituencies like organised labour in favour, in particular, of the Italian small business class.
His quarrel with the unions now is about legislation aimed at assisting that class by making it easier to shed workers. In spite of a whole series of mass demonstrations over the last six weeks, Berlusconi is not going to be deflected. "All that part of Italy that was instinctively entrepreneurial and individualistic, modern but vaguely Catholic, which had struggled ... to found the material wellbeing of families upon hard work, self-sacrifice and a cock-a-snook attitude towards the state, recognised itself in the smiling face of the tireless little Milanese businessman," writes the historian Paul Ginsborg. "On the other hand, that Italy which believed in the growth of a civil society, in the need to curb the vertical hierarchies of patron-client relations, in the rule of law and the fight against the Mafia ... was appalled."
The Italian parliament has been persuaded to pass a law on conflict of interest that allows Berlusconi to maintain his huge business and media interests. His political control of the media he does not personally own has been extended by recent changes at the top of Italian state broadcasting. He faces various charges of corruption, which he is expected to survive.
His government is pursuing the very magistrates who, by sweeping aside the old generation of politicians, gave him a chance in the first place.
The justice minister, Roberto Castelli, has attacked "magistrates who play politics", which is taken as a message that they are not going to be given the chance to harass Berlusconi or his allies in the same way for much longer.
Berlusconi is wary of Brussels in a populist way, harsh on migration, chauvinist in some of his utterances and capable of buffoonery at international gatherings. He is believed to have an eye on the presidency. With that in his sights after some years as prime minister, he might be able to prolong a Berlusconi era for a long time.
Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique earlier this year, Ignacio Ramonet called the Italian political system "more and more confused, extravagant, ridiculous and dangerous". He asked: "To what extent could this Italian model spread to other European countries?" No obvious Berlusconi figure is waiting in the wings anywhere else, but that is presumably not what Ramonet meant. The broader questions are what happens to politics in any country when the anchors of class, ideology and religion loosen and when at the same time the divisions between business, entertainment, the news media and politics become blurred, in part because of the pursuit of competitive advantage in a borderless Europe or a borderless world.
The new economies need more fragmented and malleable workers, for which read "flexible", hence the collisions between governments and unions not only in Italy but recently in Germany and in France. The demonstrators hark back to the old world of manufacturing and state-owned services, where organised labour and political parties rooted in the working class were strong, and matched by equally strong parties of the moderate right, while a professional middle class, dividing itself politically between the two, was united in an interest in rules and in probity in public affairs.
The tendency for politics to be seen in part as a branch of consumption and a form of entertainment is also generally evident. How to explain, otherwise, the prominence in the German election campaign of the issue of Gerhard Schröder's hair or, in the French, of Chirac's grocery bills or Lionel Jospin's squeaky voice?
The standard issues that Berlusconi exploited to come to power, including crime, migration, nationalism, regionalism and freedom from state meddling, are available everywhere. The means that he employed, in the shape of greatly concentrated media power, a party strong in organisation but short on debate, and a ready recourse to private wealth, are less available, but there are no guarantees that the situation could not change.
It is worrying that Europe has accepted Berlusconi with so few reservations, an acceptance symbolised by the inclusion of his party in the Christian Democrat group in the European parliament in 1999. It remains to be seen whether Europe will change him or he will change Europe.
OMG, that would be a tough call for me. As much as I like Berlusconi, I'm so beholden to Murdoch for FOX I wouldn't know which one to root for :o) Oh happy day!
And the pinkos prefer FOX NEWS, which they hate, to Berlusconi! We gotta get ahold of some editorials from Berlusconi's media outlets.
Unfortunately Silvio Berlusconi isn't so tough on immigration , maybe he's been mistaken for Umberto Bossi the leader of Norther League ; about Mediaset it's full of leftists feminists end former communists , Berlusconi is too tender.
Perhaps with the change in climate in Europe Berlusconi will be able to move more to the right. Compared to Le Pen and others, he looking more and more like a moderate. The right is finally doing what the left has done for decades: get somebody out there on the fringe to draw a significant number of votes. That makes people see regular conservatives as not so bad.
Berlusconi, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Pirelli, Ducati, and a host of fashion designers are living proof that the European socialists haven't killed the Italian entreprenuerial spirit.