Berlusconi’s whole political career has been based on a carefully crafted media image where his ‘successful’ public and private life, ‘beautiful’ wife, ‘wonderful’ children have become public grist for his propaganda mill. These constituted his ‘qualifications’ as a conservative and family oriented leader. His overwhelming ownership of Italy’s major private TV channels, publishers and newspapers, meant that Berlusconi became both the medium and the message. Berlusconi is more like a hologram than a real person.
This hologram played also successfully to a macho culture that linked success in business to success with women. Berlusconi’s many dalliances were deliberately only half hidden: not too overt to avoid provoking outrage among women and the conservative electorate, but just enough to create envy and admiration among Italy’s men.
Veronica’s decision to leave him strikes at the heart of his political strategy: it makes him into a real person with real faults whose actions have had a real and deleterious negative impact on the family he has always said he worshipped. Veronica has acted quickly to divorce Berlusconi because she knew his media empire would act rapidly to destroy her credibility and public image. Topless pictures of her as an actress have already been appearing in the press that supports Berlusconi. Veronica is guilty of ‘lesa maiestas’: she has damaged the sacred prestige of the leader. She will be punished for it.
If the Italian people are still willing to fall for and identify with Berlusconi’s charms, he will succeed. However, Veronica’s plight may just succeed in galvanising the less parochial sectors of Italy’s public opinion who have always reacted with disgust and embarrassment at Berlusconi’s very public and private antics, and inspire enough of the rest of the electorate to end his political career.
