In 2001, for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic, an opposition replaced the incumbent government as a consequence of an electoral victory. In the May General Election, the center-left government was ousted and a new right-right majority came into office. It would be premature to suggest that this election represents the birth of a new Italian political system, one that will be based on an ongoing alternation in government between two coalitions and a realignment of voters and parties. Nevertheless, the second Berlusconi government — aside from the various political judgments of it – undoubtedly constitutes an institutional and political novelty. This is not just because the left-left proved unable, in the election campaign, to exploit its achievements in office when confronted with someone with undoubted (if controversial) abilities, but also because of the likely impact of the new government on policy making and Italy's economic, social and international trajectory. This edition of Italian Politics evaluates the 2001 election and impact and analyzes the electoral success of the right, the election campaign, the crisis of the left-left after the defeat, and the composition of the new parliament.

The first book to fully document the scandal-riddled rise and fall of Italy's Prime Minister and tabloid star—Silvio Berlusconi

Before there was real estate tycoon cum President-Elect Donald J. Trump, there was Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul turned prime minster who dominated Italian life for the past twenty years. In a candid, warts-and-all portrait of the leader who played hard in office and in private life. From the bunga-bunga parties to his most secret moments with world leaders, this biography is rich in anecdotes and revelations involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel , and many others. Berlusconi's incredible rise to power started from nothing. A self-created man, he was a cruise ship crooner as a young man, became a real estate tycoon in the '70s, started the first commercial television network in history, and turned AC Milan into a world-class soccer club. And that was all before he survived the squalid swampland of Italian politics to become prime minister who has not only served the longest in Italian history, but also has generated the most controversy of arguably any world leader today.

Silvio Berlusconi, a self-made man with a taste for luxurious living, owner of a huge television empire and the politician who likened a German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard-small wonder that much of democratic Europe and America has responded with considerable dismay and disdain to his governance of Italy. Paul Ginsborg, contemporary Italy's foremost historian, explains here why we should take Berlusconi seriously. His new book combines historical narrative-Berlusconi's childhood in the dynamic and paternalist Milanese bourgeoisie, his strict religious schooling, a working life which has encompassed crooning, large construction projects and the creation of a commercial television empire-with careful analysis of Berlusconi's political development. While highlighting the particular italianita of Berlusconi's trajectory, Ginsborg also finds international tendencies, such as the distorted relationship between the media system and politics. Throughout, Ginsborg suggests that Berlusconi has gotten as far as he has thanks to the wide-open space left by the strategic weaknesses of modern left-wing politics.

Berlusconi's Italy provides a fresh, thoroughly-informed account of how Italy's richest man came to be its political leader. Without dismissing the importance of personalities and political parties, it emphasizes the significance of changes in voting behaviors that led to the rise-and eventual fall-of Silvio Berlusconi, the millionaire media baron who became Prime Minister. Armed with new data and new analytic tools, Michael Shin and John Agnew use recently developed methods of spatial analysis, to offer a compelling new argument about contextual re-creation and mutation. They reveal that regional politics and shifting geographical voting patterns were far more important to Berlusconi's successes than the widely-credited role of the mass media, and conclude that Berlusconi's success (and later defeat) can be best understood in geographic terms.

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Following his third election victory in 2008, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the most controversial head of government in the EU. This is a cogent examination of the Berlusconi phenomenon, exploring the success and development of the new populist right-wing coalition in Italy since the collapse of the post-war party system in the early 1990s. Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella provide a comprehensive discussion of the three main parties of the Italian right: Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the xenophobic and regionalist populist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance. The book assesses the implications of this controversial right for the Italian democratic system and examines how the social and political peculiarities of Italy have allowed such political formations to emerge and enjoy repeated electoral success. Framed in a comparative perspective, the authors: explore the nature of the Italian right in the context of right-wing parties and populist phenomena elsewhere in other advanced democracies, drawing comparisons and providing broader explanations. locate the parties of the Italian right within the existing theoretical conceptions of right-wing and populist parties, utilising a multi-method approach, including a content analysis of party programmes. highlight the importance of political and discursive opportunities in explaining the success of the Italian right, and the agency role of a political leadership that has skilfully shaped and communicated an ideological package to exploit these opportunities. Providing an excellent insight into a key European nation, this work provides a thoughtful and stimulating contribution to the research on the Italian right, and its implications for democratic politics.

This book chronicles the demise of the supposedly leftist Italian cultural establishment during the long 1980s. During that time, the nation's literary and intellectual vanguard managed to lose the prominence handed it after the end of World War II and the defeat of Fascism. What emerged instead was a uniquely Italian brand of cultural capital that deliberately avoided any critical questioning of the prevailing order. Ricciardi criticizes the development of this new hegemonic arrangement in film, literature, philosophy, and art criticism. She focuses on several turning points: Fellini's futile, late-career critique of Berlusconi-style commercial television, Calvino's late turn to reactionary belletrism, Vattimo's nihilist and conservative responses to French poststructuralism, and Bonito Oliva's movement of art commodification, Transavanguardia.

Not a Normal Country explores Italian politics and culture in the era of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man and one of its longest serving prime ministers. Geoff Andrews argues that the ‘Berlusconi phenomenon’ was a populist response to widespread cynicism towards politics. Berlusconi posed as an ‘anti-politician’, and based his appeal on his virtues as a salesman rather than a statesman. The second part of the book discusses the varied opposition to Berlusconi. This ranges from the anti-global demonstrations in Genoa in 2001 to unconventional protests such as the Girotondo movement led by the film director Nanni Moretti. According to Andrews, this new associationism has helped rebuild Italian politics. Finally, Andrews looks to the future and, through the examples of anti-mafia protests in Sicily as well as opposition to the Americanisation of Italian culture, considers the prospects for the new post-Berlusconi Italy.

Edited by members of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and bringing together academics in Britain, Ireland, the US and Italy, this volume takes an international perspective on Italian events. It investigates how resistance to the new conservative culture has been articulated, and how this has been expressed and explained by those involved. The volume is divided into four areas: 1. The Economic and Media Landscapes, which sets the scene for the rest of the book by explaining how Italian society, and particularly its media environment, have developed in recent years; 2. Political Challenges, which discusses the main threats to the authority and policies of Berlusconi coming from within his own centre-right coalition, the left and social movements; 3. Texts, which analyses films, internet sites, television programmes, novels, newspaper articles and theatre performances that sought to resist increasingly dominant conservative norms and/or respond to events set in motion by the Berlusconi governments; 4.Experiences, covering the voices and practices of those who have opposed Berlusconi from within the cultural industries and identity movements, such as journalists, LGBT activists, feminists and associations representing immigrant communities. Wide-ranging, innovative and challenging, this volume should appeal to all those who have an interest in Italy, political-, media- and cultural studies.