Berlusconi Tries On Many Faces for Voters By IAN FISHER - THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: February 14, 2006 TURIN, Italy, Feb. 13
Silvio Berlusconi wanted to set the record straight: He was "joking" when he compared himself to Napoleon the day before. "I am the Jesus Christ of politics," he corrected himself in a speech on Saturday. "I am a patient victim; I bear everything; I sacrifice myself for everyone." This came the same day that Mr. Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, put himself in Churchill's league and not long after he made a vow to a priest not to have sex until the end of his already strenuous exertions to be re-elected in April.
For almost any other politician, in almost any other country, comments like these might not be considered helpful to that goal — especially for a politician who, according to various polls, still lags behind his opponent, Romano Prodi. And, to be sure, his comparison to Christ did not go down well. "One does not do that," an Italian cardinal, Ersilio Tonini, was quoted as saying. One of Mr. Berlusconi's wary political allies, Pier Ferdinando Casini, said, "We do not mix nonsense with serious things." But Mr. Berlusconi, who rose from nothing to become Italy's richest man, has made a political career both of saying outrageous things and of surviving terrible odds. So however much the nation might roll its eyes at him, Italians also know he is very smart and figure there must be method to the madness.
"At the end, we have to remember that Berlusconi is a fantastic salesman," said Lawrence Gray, a professor of political science at John Cabot University in Rome. "He's always selling himself. That in a way always has something to do with whatever he says." The last few weeks have been a time of furious salesmanship. It was for a while impossible to miss Mr. Berlusconi on national television (he owns three stations himself) almost every night, as well as on the radio, in newspapers and in magazines. It was an all-out media blitz, about his accomplishments, about his promises, about how bad the other guy is.
It sometimes seems that his strategy is to talk so much that he drowns out every other voice. But now, since Parliament was dissolved, television time by law must be divided equally between himself and Mr. Prodi, and some commentators suggest that Mr. Berlusconi is finding that he needs to get more outrageous to keep attracting attention. "We have worked a lot," he said on television on Friday. "Only Napoleon did more." When asked if he wanted to make a comparison, Mr. Berlusconi, whose height at around 5 feet 6 or so seems an eternal adversary, said, "I am certainly taller."
The next day, he sidled up to Churchill. "Churchill liberated us from the Nazis," he said in the eastern city of Ancona. "Silvio Berlusconi is liberating us from Communists." Painting his leftist opponents as Communists has been part of his strategy for years. The charge has some truth; one of the coalition partners on the left is the Refounded Communists. That same day, after a lukewarm reaction from his allies to a new "Contract with Italy" that Mr. Berlusconi rolled out on his own, he felt victimized and alone enough to compare himself to Jesus.
Some commentators smell a bit of desperation in the prime minister, on the theory that only a candidate who knows he is in grave danger would work so hard and say such peculiar things. But, wounded as he is, few people rule him out, and certainly not Mr. Berlusconi. In addition to his political talents and his torrent of words, he also has money. After the Jesus comparison, he lamented that the nation's rich establishment was trying to ruin him. "They are egoists," he said. "They should do what I am doing and put their hands in their wallets. This electoral campaign is costing me a billion old lira a day." That is a little over half a million dollars.
L'articolo tradotto in Italiano.
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