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11 Maggio 2001
Nazi scandal forces minister to quit FROM DAVID LISTER IN BRUSSELS A SENIOR Flemish politician has resigned after being photographed at a reunion of Nazi SS veterans. The affair is deeply embarrassing to Belgium as it prepares to take over the presidency of the European Union. Johan Sauwens stepped down from the post of Interior Minister in Belgiums Flemish regional government after photographs and video footage showed him singing Nazi songs and taking part in a parade of uniformed extremists at a right-wing gathering in Antwerp last weekend. Mr Sauwens was a member for 25 years of the Sint-Maartensfonds, a support group for Belgian SS veterans who fought with the Nazis on the Russian front. Film of the meeting, which has caused outrage in Belgium, showed the minister standing to sing the anthem of the Flemish SS brigade, including a call to arms. Some 1,500 people, mostly pensioners, packed the hall in which SS crests and photographs of Waffen SS soldiers hung on the walls; a banner, in a reference to a larger Germania, declared: Our Aim: A New Start. One participant called openly for the creation of a Greater Germany. Some veterans wore the unmistakable grey shirts and ties of the far-right Voorpost party, while others were in the uniform of the Vlaamse Militanten Orde, an outlawed militant organisation that includes several paramilitary cells. Mr Sauwens, who was asked to resign after a six-hour meeting of his party, the nationalist Flanders Volksunie (Peoples Union) on Wednesday night, said that he had resigned in an attempt to stop the Flemish regional government from plunging into deeper trouble. The other three parties in the coalition administration, one of three regional executives in Belgium, all called on him to go. The former minister, who has apologised for what he called an error of judgment, has denied claims that he is a Nazi sympathiser and said that he attended the meeting, held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Sint-Maartensfonds, unwittingly. Some friends invited me, he said. I turned up without paying attention to the decor and didnt for a moment stop to think about what was being said. I wasnt familiar with the patriotic songs they were singing. He admitted he might have attended one or two barbecues organised by the Sint-Maartensfonds as well as receiving its monthly magazine. In April 1989 the entire publication was devoted to the 100th birthday of Adolf Hitler. In Belgium, where people are desperate to shake off a spate of scandals that range from paedophilia to food scares, the Sauwens affair has been seized on as proof of the gap that continues to exist between attempts to restore national pride and the countrys poor image abroad. Forbidden uniforms, propaganda, Nazi chanting: the Flemish minister was not at a tea party, proclaimed a headline in Belgiums Le Soir newspaper yesterday. The Sauwens affair is like a boomerang for a new Government which has put defence of human rights at the top of its list of priorities, the French-language La Libre Belgique said. It has been a sober reminder of Belgiums continuing struggle to come to terms with its role in the Second World War, when thousands of collaborators, particularly in Flanders, helped the Nazis. It has also been embarrassing for Belgiums coalition Government. Louis Michel, the Foreign Minister, said yesterday that the Sauwens affair was likely to damage Belgiums image in Europe and cast doubt on its European values. The country will take over the EUs rotating six-month presidency on July 1.
Editorial comment: Blind trust in Berlusconi It is time for Silvio Berlusconi to end the equivocation about the future of his huge business interests. The leader of Italy's centre-right alliance has still not explained exactly what he intends to do about his businesses should he become prime minister in Sunday's elections. Last week he raised expectations that he would sell his controlling stake in Mediaset, which runs Italy's three main private television channels. Heady with the scent of victory, Mr Berlusconi has since retreated. He now envisages some sort of "blind trust" for his assets. Legislation to that end might be introduced within 100 days of taking office. Mr Berlusconi has appointed three as yet anonymous advisers to suggest how this might be done. Whatever their recommendation, it is hard to see how placing the media magnate's business stakes in the hands of an independent administrator would prevent conflicts of interest. A blind trust can only work if it involves diversified and liquid assets, such as a mutual fund, where the trustees have full rights of disposal. If run properly, the true owner would not know the nature of the investments made in his name. Transferring Mr Berlusconi's vast corporate holdings intact to a trust is hardly a blind arrangement. They would still be universally considered as Berlusconi companies. As long as he remains the beneficiary, there will be suspicion that his decisions are commercially driven. Mr Berlusconi is committed to modernising the economy. But could he credibly introduce private pensions when he owns a large part of Mediolanum, a financial services provider? Could he be objective about the future of RAI, the state broadcaster? How would tax reform affect his corporate concerns? Mr Berlusconi should look to America. Paul O'Neill, the new US Treasury secretary, has agreed to sell his stock and options in Alcoa. Initially he insisted on keeping his shares and excluding himself from any discussions that might affect the aluminium giant. After a few weeks in office, he realised this was completely impractical considering his wide-ranging brief. The Forza Italia leader should follow his example and divest. During Mr Berlusconi's spell as prime minister in 1994 no blind trust was created, partly because he was not in power for long enough, partly because Italy was in the throes of the Tangentopoli bribery scandal. Given the country's history of self-enrichment in public office, Mr Berlusconi's wealth was seen as a virtue. Italy has since moved on. Mr Berlusconi has not. If he wishes to be seen as a credible leader at home and in the capitals of Europe he must show that he is capable of distinguishing his political ambitions from his commercial interests.
Berlusconi Challenges the Culture John Vinocur ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." For Related Topics See: Europe Front Page < < Back to Start of Article Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me." Is He a Menace to Democracy, or Is This Politics Italian-Style? ROME Silvio Berlusconi, appearing this week on one of three Italian television networks that his companies own, offered a list of the disobliging names he has been called since Italy's current political campaign began: buffoon, barbarian, a Ceausescu. . He left out vulgarian but reveled, grin ablaze, in projecting himself as a persecuted man whose benevolent, protective mission was taking the hits from those who would drag the country down. . As Italians prepare to vote Sunday, the question is how such a decried and problematical figure could be the candidate who polls say will become prime minister regardless of unresolved conflicts of interest and prosecutions for corruption. The answer is that a substantial number of Italians are not much concerned about the fears expressed by the tycoon's numerous critics. . "He's got a big ego" said Giuliano Ferrara, a Berlusconi supporter and business associate, "but he doesn't threaten people." So the polls suggest. Italians are "unfazed" by the ongoing prosecutions and questions of conflict of interest involving Mr. Berlusconi, according to the Reuters news agency, while The Associated Press used "unconcerned" as a descriptive. . For many, the prospect of a Berlusconi victory over the incumbent leftist alliance led by Francesco Rutelli opens a vast and scary terrain. Mr. Berlusconi would enjoy extraordinary reach as at once the country's richest man, head of government, and master of much of its media. His wealth and methods have been criminally suspect, and his center-right electoral allies include old fascists and presumed far-right nasties. . However, a series of expressions of doubt about Mr. Berlusconi's fitness to rule, raised in European publications over the past two weeks, has, if anything, won him about two more percentage points in the projected vote total, according to Nicola Piepoli of CIRM Market Research. . Mr. Piepoli insisted that the election was without issues, with all matters of political debate subordinated to insignificance in a referendum on Mr. Berlusconi. His scores got better when attacked, Mr. Piepoli said, and compared the Berlusconi phenomenon to an airplane, "which we all know is heavier than air but flies anyway." . Lowering taxes, economizing on marginal government services, sweeping out Italy's caste of professional pols, and providing competent administrative management are on Mr. Berlusconi's agenda. But this is largely vague. . Besides his person, he does not offer much that is specific to spur a declining economy that is still double the size of Spain's, but has fallen in competitiveness so that it stands No. 32 in the world, behind Estonia, Chile, Hungary and Greece, in rankings published this month by the Institute for Management Development of Lausanne. . Indeed, what Mr. Berlusconi, 64, would actually do as prime minister is perhaps not the greatest mystery about the election. . After all - Mr. Berlusconi has said as much himself - Italy's ties to the European Union and NATO would essentially confine his action to a familiar framework. What may be regarded as his most abrasive campaign proposal, a plan to have the government provide the judiciary with target zones for its investigations, is described as a parliamentary nonstarter aimed mainly at bolstering Mr. Berlusconi's arguments that his troubles with the law came from persecution by politically inspired judges of the left. . Rather, the bigger mystery is how Italy looks largely with indifference at Mr. Berlusconi's past and his refusal to say if or how he would dispose of his dominant holdings in television and other media. . In a wider context, the question is whether in choosing Mr. Berlusconi, Italy, a founder nation of the European Union, forfeits the assumption it has the same political culture as most of the rest of the EU countries. . Many Europeans outside Italy have portrayed the vote, sometimes operatically, as a morality drama involving the survival of Italian democracy. Some Italians turn that approach inside out, asking whether Europe has enough commitment to nuance and fairness to examine the Italian political process without distorted caricature. . As his supporter, Mr. Ferrara, put it, "Berlusconi is a bit of a megalomaniac, but Kim Il Sung he is not." . The questions relate to the implosion of the postwar system of Italian political parties in the early 1990s. Investigating magistrates exposed vast corruption among the parties and their leaders. On the one hand, Mr. Berlusconi became a central target of those investigations. On the other, corruption was shown to be a way of life that required the complicity of an immense number of Italians. . The circumstances have left a residue of sympathy and understanding for Mr. Berlusconi that an entrepreneur and politician in similar circumstances might not find in another country. . As an example, Emanuela Poli, a political scientist who is preparing a book on Forza Italia, Mr. Berlusconi's party, has been quoted as saying that a large number of Italians regard Mr. Berlusconi's cozy relationship with Bettino Craxi, the disgraced former Socialist prime minister, as a point in the candidate's favor, rather than a concern. . "Italians know that to do business in this country having friends in the political world is inevitable," Ms. Poli said. "Those who love [Berlusconi] say, 'All right, if you want to open a café you have to know the local commissioner who gives out licenses or you wait forever.'" . In fact, Mr. Berlusconi was convicted three times, on charges of bribery of tax investigators, giving money illegally to Mr. Craxi's party, and for falsifying business accounts. In each case, he was able to successfully invoke Italy's statute of limitations in appeals courts. Currently, the candidate is a defendant in a case before the courts involving the bribery of judges, and is under investigation by magistrates in Italy and Spain relating to his Fininvest holding company. . In an Italian context, all of this is old news, and it fits into the broader circumstances of the country's conflictual attitudes toward the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption drive of the early 90s. Mr. Berlusconi ridicules all his legal problems as politically inspired, but Francesco Saverio Borelli, the state attorney for Milan and a chief investigator, has acknowledged that the investigating judges actually lost the people's confidence as they bored deeper into everyday, generalized corruption. . When pointed out by foreigners, this kind of Italian exceptionalism (summed up by the phrase "things, regrettably, have to be done here in certain ways that none of us like") gets Italians' attention, but is not appreciated. Three and four years ago, when there was strong objection to Italy's being admitted into the first wave of countries to form the European Monetary System, open resistance in Frankfurt to the traditional lack of austerity in Italy's treasury was transformed by some Italians into racism. . These days, a leading leftist editor said Mr. Berlusconi was significantly helped by Gianni Agnelli, honorary chairman of Fiat SpA, complaining that pronouncements from elsewhere in Europe that Mr. Berlusconi was unfit suggested that Italy was a banana republic. . All the same, Stefano Folli, a writer for Corriere della Sera, recognized the existence of what he called "a political sensibility gap" between Italy and Europe. . Here, where 40 percent of voters do not care about Mr. Berlusconi's potential conflicts of interest - if he were prime minister, he would theoretically control all six of Italy's main private and public television channels - the candidate has chosen a self-justifying argument startling in its candor, hardly a cause of scandal locally, although one likely to be poorly understood in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. . Referring to the seven-month period in 1994 when he held the office of prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi said, referring to his television company: "The left wanted me to sell Mediaset. I'd spent 35 years building it up, adding, "So where would I be if had sold it then?" . But the entire political spectrum has had its part in sustaining the public's indifferent mindset. In reality, the departing leftist government never attempted to pass a bill resolving the subject. In fact, it is sometimes said in Italy that the left avoided dealing with the issue, hoping to club Mr. Berlusconi, who served as parliamentary opposition leader, with it during the campaign. . One of the great ironies reinforcing the likelihood of Mr. Berlusconi's victory is that because of the country's history of weak governments, a politically influenced judiciary, and wavering confidence in the rule of law there is a tendency by commentators and political scientists to rationalize a number of the most troubling aspects of his rise. It is as if even among people strongly opposed to Mr. Berlusconi, there is a need to intellectually counterbalance his phenomenon by finding coherent explanations for it. And they provide a kind of legitimacy to the process. . For example, Umberto Eco, the novelist and academic, has suggested the Berlusconi phenomenon has aspects of a "cargo cult," or the Pacific Island religion in which believers thought airplanes or freighters would arrive with white gods bearing refrigerators and candy bars. . Mr. Eco explains Mr. Berlusconi as having understood the collapse of traditional ideology and its replacement by the populist values of the mass media. Brilliantly, Mr. Berlusconi fell on the idea of presenting himself as too rich to steal and able to transmogrify his own success into wealth for the whole nation. . Mr. Berlusconi's electoral alliance with the rightist Northern League and the post-Fascist National Alliance provides a similar example. . Umberto Bossi, the League's leader, is almost unanimously regarded as a xenophobic and unstable figure, and Gianfranco Fini, the head of Alliance, as a skilled but cynical politician who has backed off from the far edges of rightist extremism in carefully measured steps. Mr. Berlusconi does not share their taint of prejudice, but attempts to focus attention on their role as coalition allies dissolve in debate on how much or little they resemble Jean-Marie Le Pen of France or Joerg Haider of Austria. . Ezio Mauro, editor of La Repubblica, the country's leading leftist newspaper, insists that Mr. Berlusconi's grouping has blurred the lines between the acceptable and unacceptable on the right. "Extremism, post-Fascism, populism," Mr. Mauro said. "We have it. And it's different." . Yet Sergio Romano, the former Italian ambassador to the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who is no admirer of Mr. Berlusconi, argues that neither Mr. Bossi nor Mr. Fini fits the "Nazi and Vichy-family label of Le Pen and Haider." Still, he says, compromises have been made, and "that's the hypocritical diet we're forced to eat." . Whether it is a matter of conviction or very strong willingness to avoid bringing discredit to Italy, almost no one in the country would say, as has been so often repeated abroad, that a Berlusconi victory would menace democracy. . "I refuse any demonization," said Massimo D'Alema, the former leftist prime minister. "If the right wins, it won't do away with basic freedoms." . An Italian political scientist, Franco Pavoncello, who is dean of academic affairs at the Rome campus of John Cabot University, complained about "this attitude abroad treating Italian politics as somehow 'funny.' What might appear as very unstable is actually supported by very important guarantees, including those of the EU. So there are roots for democratic life here that are underestimated elsewhere." . For Mr. Mauro, the campaign had been ugly, not a fair fight, and that boded ill. By his newspaper's estimate, Mr. Berlusconi outspent Mr. Rutelli tenfold, while running away from a televised debate. . Nonetheless, he said, "I know Berlusconi will not be a direct threat to democracy," And he added: "But there are many specific issues where the problem is a real one." . In the broadest sense, this is not so radically different than what Mr. Berlusconi's friend, Giuliano Ferrara, had to say on an Italian future with Mr. Berlusconi. Mr. Ferrara assured that he will try "not to be too partisan" and "won't go against generally shared values." . But Mr. Ferrara acknowledged he had a concern. . "He's really in a bad mood," he said of Mr. Berlusconi. "It's the left's attacks on him. From time to time, he becomes violent and brutal in his response, and I've told him this. . "He's got to pacify Italy, bring peace. There's been a verbal civil war. Peace has to come in a bipartisan space. There's a danger of isolation, no dialogue and the transformation of adversaries into enemies. That worries me."
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