Politics moves fast, very fast indeed. We realize this the day after a piece of news which, only about ten years ago, would have monopolized all the news programs: from those of the duopoly to the more radical-chic one of La7, up to the editions of the most recondite local television stations. There would have been pages of articles signed by the most influential and influential political commentators. The talk show editorial teams would have set up wonderful cross-examination theaters for at least a couple of months. Dozens of podcasts would flood YouTube and Spotify with in-depth analysis, then reproduced in clips on TikTok. And instead, nothing. A few articles here and there on the fifth page, a few dozen editorials between one thousand and two thousand characters (including spaces), some distinctions from the champions of militant anti-Berlusconism of the golden years – from after Mani Pulite to the Monti government – and nothing more.

End of a collective illusion: Berlusconi and the myth of the “punciutu”

The news is this: Silvio Berlusconi was not and has never been a mafia member. We learn from a judgment of the Court of Cassation, almost as if it were a weather report. Rains? Perhaps. Maybe. Berlusconi was not and has never been “punciutu”. On the other hand, Paolo Sorrentino himself, in “Loro” (a film never actually distributed in Italy, except for the few weeks of screening in cinemas between April and May 2018), unlike his other film Il Divo – in which Giulio Andreotti went to meet Totò Riina to kiss him in a villa in the Sicilian countryside, to the tune of a jaunty indie song – made no reference to the mafia Knight. Tits and asses, yes. And also big German cars, villas between Brianza and Sardinia, middle-class buildings, botanical gardens, artificial volcanoes, sun, sea, yachts, sleepless nights, guitars and pianos, double-breasted Caraceni, chronically depressed companions of power, tireless and uncritical corporate people. But also failed marriages, lovers of more or less age, depressed and bored wives, loneliness and calls in the middle of the night to naive housewives convinced to buy a house in Milan 2. But mafia, never. Nothing. Not even a shadow. In short, the premise on which dozens of journalists have built their careers, just as hundreds of comedians and satirists have increased their fame as intransigent artists “against the power that united the State to the Mafia” – through TV programmes, books, cartoons in newspapers, even in the Smemoranda diaries – is not true. It was never true. This was established by a judgment on the special surveillance and preventive confiscation of Marcello Dell’Utri, Berlusconi’s historic collaborator, from a few days ago: “To date, no laundering activity by Cosa Nostra in Berlusconi’s companies has ever been proven in court.” In summary, the Court considers the thesis according to which Berlusconi paid Marcello Dell’Utri to buy his “silence” regarding alleged and never proven agreements with Cosa Nostra to be unproven and devoid of logic. Then of course, in 2014 Marcello Dell’Utri was definitively convicted of external complicity in a mafia association, with reference to the events that occurred up to 1992. The reasons for the conviction – confirmed by the Supreme Court – describe Dell’Utri as the stable intermediary between Cosa Nostra and Silvio Berlusconi, then an entrepreneur. Just as, already in 2012, the Supreme Court itself had considered it as established as a historical fact that sums of money were paid by way of extortion to obtain protection for the economic activities of the Berlusconi group. In that context, the name of Vittorio Mangano emerged as a link between the Arcore residence and the Palermo mafia leaders. Berlusconi was never tried for those episodes: not because the facts were non-existent, but because the conduct was prescribed. Those elements still remain in the judicial documents, and no subsequent decision has ever denied their validity. But technically, Berlusconi was never convicted of mafia charges. And this too is a fact.

The “Portrait of Dorian Gray” of anti-Berlusconi Italy

And so we ask ourselves if we have all been victims, for a good thirty years, of a collective illusion. Berlusconi is the “mafioso” par excellence, almost as if it were – for the anti-Berlusconians – a logical consequence of being Berlusconi. Or perhaps, for a good thirty years – the same ones that today separate us from the Mani Pulite season – he did not, in reality, represent our “Portrait of Dorian Gray”. As if half the country – that of the Olive Tree and then of the Union, of the Canzone Popolare, of the “moderate” leaders who federated the centre-left, of the Circus Maximus, of the girotondi – had reflected itself, with all its vices and its whitewashed tombs, in Berlusconi. In him he embodied what he did not accept about himself: the desire for wealth, for power, the attraction for comfort, for the villa by the sea, for the new car, for the younger lover. All this in the face of a typically Catholic and petty-bourgeois sense of guilt. That sense of guilt that he – the other “Son of the Century” – never felt intimately, especially after the death of mother Rosa.

The late San Berlusconi, no longer a mafioso

Here: he experienced, in that part of the country, almost all the petty-bourgeois vices without really feeling guilty. Leaving the other half of the country the cathartic role of rebuking them. Everyone. Vices, in reality, inherent in Italian national-popular culture. Berlusconi was believed and defined as a “mafioso” regardless of the trial evidence and sentences. Half the country saw him as perfect like this, “punciutu”. And now that justice “acquits” him, there’s a big problem. As if they had removed the stigmata of a saint, demoting him – at most – to a blessed one: the late San Berlusconi, no longer a mafia member. As if a superpower had been taken away from him. After all, that same half of the country – which today struggles to fully recognize itself in this new political season, so much so that the “Party of Abstention” has grown enormously – would perhaps have preferred Berlusconi like this: “mafioso” arch-Italian. Perfect for taking on all the atavistic guilt of an entire country.