Silvio Renzi

By Jacopo Barrigazzi

Like (god)father like son: Current Italian PM conjures up similarities with Berlusconi.

ROME — Spray painted on a wall in Florence, Italy, are two suited politicians. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and a younger image of his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, sit above the logo: “Spot the difference.”

At first sight, it’s easy. One is a 78-year-old, right-wing media tycoon, known for his controversial encounters with women and Italian tax laws; the other, a 40-year-old, left-wing, Catholic, former Boy Scout. Berlusconi is a businessman who entered politics at the age of 58. Renzi went into politics in his twenties.
Yet when it comes to their styles of leadership and, more surprisingly, their policy ideas, there are striking similarities. From labor laws and taxation to clamping down on public prosecutors, Renzi and Berlusconi have more in common than first meets the eye.

“Renzi is a kind of son for Berlusconi,” said Giuliano Ferrara, a former Berlusconi minister and for many years one of his closest advisers. “He has carried out many of the things that Berlusconi did not manage to do.”
The current prime minister’s first 500 days in office have earned him a reputation for ruling with an iron grip, silencing dissent within his party and relying on his communication skills to rise above Italy’s fractious daily politics to appeal directly to the public. In other words, of governing like Berlusconi during his three tours at Palazzo Chigi.
Renzi is also pushing an ambitious plan to cut taxes, has revamped labor laws making it easier to fire workers and is introducing electoral changes giving more power to the prime minister, at the expense of the Senate.
He also wants to regulate the way prosecutors use wiretapping, a hot topic in mafia- and corruption-ridden Italy, and he has publicly endorsed Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

“…They speak to voters’ guts and not only to their minds” — Giuliano da Empoli

Berlusconi, when first elected in 1994, also promised Italians to cut taxes. He then tried to introduce a labor reform very similar to Renzi’s, but was stopped by trade unions. He modified the electoral law to give the prime minister more power and reduce the role of the Senate, though his changes were later rejected in a referendum. He often clashed with prosecutors probing his activities and called for restrictions on their powers, including on their use of wiretapping.
As for Putin, Berlusconi made his very close relationship with the Russian leader a key plank of his foreign policy.
What is most crucial for the rest of Europe, however, is whether the characteristics that Renzi shares with Berlusconi will help or hinder his desperate campaigns to pull Italy out of crisis and put an end to speculation that it could become the next Greece.
While Berlusconi largely denied towards the end of his term that Italy was in crisis at all, Renzi is painfully aware that his political future hinges on his ability to carry out reforms of the long-stalled economy, under the beady eye of Brussels.
Although his term is due to last until 2018, new elections could be called soon if Renzi loses his grip on the Senate, where his majority is already thin.

One-man band

If Berlusconi’s disdain for the niceties of parliamentary democracy was notorious, Renzi’s cabinet “looks very similar to the local council in Florence when he was the mayor of the city. It’s designed so that nobody overshadows him, like a one-man show,” said Renzi’s biographer, David Allegranti.
In Berlusconi’s case, it was the impatience of the self-made man, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at about €7 billion, making him the sixth most affluent Italian. For Renzi, being mayor meant he had much more freedom to shuffle his personnel than he now does as prime minister, allowing him to assume sweeping powers in Florence.
Soon after being elected mayor, Renzi announced that the heart of the tourist district would be turned into a pedestrian zone in 10 days, ending a years-long controversy.  
“The announcement forced the bureaucratic machine to follow him,” said Giuliano da Empoli, who was deputy mayor for culture when Renzi was the mayor of Florence. “What the two men share is that they speak to voters’ guts and not only to their minds.”
Berlusconi was known to make similar snap decisions. Like when, in 2007, he abruptly announced a plan to merge his Forza Italia! party, named after an Italian football chant, with other smaller right-wing parties. This created the People of Freedom (Popolo della libertà) party with which he won the elections a few months later.
Critics also say the pair share authoritarian instincts. Renzi has had 10 members of the Italian Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee temporarily removed because they opposed a new law giving sweeping powers to the prime minister. In 2002, Berlusconi had two journalists and a comedian banned from state television Rai, saying their criticism of him amounted to “criminal use” of the public broadcaster.

Scandalous Silvio

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the pair have attempted to strike alliances.
At the beginning of Renzi’s government, they created the “Nazarene Pact,” named after the headquarters of Renzi’s Democratic Party on the Via del Nazareno, where Renzi first met the media magnate to plan the electoral changes.
The deal fell apart a year later with Berlusconi feeling betrayed because Renzi did not involve him in the appointment of the new President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella. But they rekindled their ties this month when the government had to appoint the new management of Rai. The two came to a deal.
While Renzi can’t compete with Berlusconi when it comes to charm, he does have the advantage of lacking the older man’s legal baggage.
Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and banned from standing for public office. His government was often paralyzed by his legal battles and beyond Italy’s frontiers he is better now for sexual scandals than politics.
As one of the largest publishers and broadcasters in the country, he faced frequent accusations of conflict of interests as prime minister and one of his right-hand men, Marcello Dell’Utri, is serving a seven-year jail sentence for links to the Sicilian mafia.
In policy terms, Renzi is much more progressive than Berlusconi, who had no compunction about sharing power with the xenophobic Northern League and who branded illegal immigrants an “army of evil” back in 2008, while still in office.
“Please, let’s not compare him with Berlusconi,” said Ivan Scalfarotto, vice president of Renzi’s party.
He said Renzi simply does “what every politician does, which is to rule, and, at the end of his term, Italians will vote.”
This is precisely where Berlusconi, who was prime minister three times between 1994 and 2011, excelled, even if he did not deliver the reforms he promised.
Renzi, on the other hand, has already delivered enough reforms just one and a half years into his first term that he has won the admiration of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was never a fan of Berlusconi.
But can the youngest prime minister in Italian history turn his reforms into votes? 
After winning last year’s European elections with a record 40 percent, boosted by disillusioned Berlusconi voters, Renzi is losing his grip. Only 35 percent of the electorate has confidence in him — about half the level of after the European election — and he has suffered defections in the Democratic Party that have left him with a wafer-thin majority in the Senate.
Renzi, it seems, needs Berlusconi as much as ever to push through the reforms upon which not just his reputation, but Italy’s ability to emerge from two decades of anemic economic growth, depend.