ANALYSIS – In Italy where it is the coalitions and not the parties that govern, the politician has allowed the alliance, hitherto inconceivable, between liberals, conservatives and post-fascists.
Silvio Berlusconi is no longer except for a paradox. With his disappearance on Monday add this one: rider left an indelible imprint on Italian public life to posterity, without having any heirs behind him. Inimitable during his lifetime, no one can succeed him after his death. He was, however, the man of all agreements and all coalitions. “Nobody can lay claim to him, but everyone can be grateful to him for something at least», summarizes the political scientist Hugues Portelli, author of Berlusconi’s Italy (Buchet-Chastel, 2006). Should we therefore give up seeking the contours of an implausible “berlusconism»? No, because that would be missing the point: by bringing the right back to power through an unprecedented alliance, the former President of the Italian Council laid the foundations in 1994 for a strategy of union of the right which, for its part, runs the risk of survive.
It will be retorted that Berlusconi was not a doctrinaire – rather a formidable…