ROME: Has Italy ever been a real democracy? After unification in 1860, a political elite ruled by manipulating a tiny electorate, and by repressing all dissent. Most men were not given the vote until 1913. After the first world war, Italy came close to revolution, and fascism abolished this limited democratic system in the mid-1920s. Mussolini was in power for more than 20 years.

All Italians were allowed to go to the ballot box in 1945, and since then the formal aspects of Italian democracy have survived, despite serious pressure from both the inside (secret service plots, fascism, red terrorism) and the outside (the cold war, with all its ramifications, was fought out most bitterly of all in Italy).

Yet, although this was a democratic system, from 1945 to 1996, only one side ever won - the Christian Democrats. There are serious doubts as to whether the “other side”, the communists, would have been allowed to govern even if it had been victorious. A peaceful change of government came only in 1996, with the election of a centre-left coalition under the premiership of Romano Prodi, currently president of the European Commission.

This positive moment was threatened by the presence in Italian politics of a billionaire media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi, whose bizarre coalition of northern regionalists, post-fascists, ex-Christian Democrats and self-styled Thatcherites swept to power in May 2001. Since then, many intellectuals have claimed that the democratic state is under threat, thanks, above all, to the unresolved question of the conflict between Berlusconi’s public and private interests.

His first 10 months in power have been marked by laws helping him and his friends through a series of legal problems. The new government kicked off in highly controversial fashion with beating, torturing and even killing at the G8 in Genoa in July 2001. The whitewashing of this repression, justified retrospectively by the events of Sept 11, was the first sign of a style of government “unfit” (as the Economist famously called Berlusconi during the election campaign) to govern a democratic country.

Two massive but highly readable books help us understand the complicated history of Italian democracy over the course of the last century or so. Italian politics has always been marked by politicians changing sides and adapting alliances for the sake of expedience. Mussolini was the most famous “transformist” in Italian history.

A blacksmith’s son from the radical Romagna region, he was a fiery socialist in his youth, who flitted from Switzerland to Trent to Milan within the structures of the Italian Socialist party. He led strikes and riots against Italy’s colonial wars with Libya in 1911-12 and was part of the anti-militarism which led to “Red Week” in 1914, when the government lost control of parts of central Italy for a short time.

By October 1914, Mussolini had “transformed” himself into a supporter of Italy’s participation in the Great War. Expelled from the Socialist party, he founded the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, which preached a potent mix of nationalism, anti-parliamentarism and social justice. As Italy teetered on the brink of revolution in 1919-20, the “two red years”, he formed a small movement which he called fascismo (meaning simply “a group of organizations”). As socialist revolution failed, the fascists moved in and, during the “two black years” of 1921-22, destroyed the left through mass violence, murder and intimidation, while the state stood by. By 1922, Mussolini had been installed as prime minister, after threatening an armed coup.

Fascism modernized Italy from above, and covered it with rhetorical slogans - “Mussolini is always right”, “We dream of a Roman future”. Italy sent thousands of troops into Ethiopia, using poison gas to repress the local population. In 1938, Mussolini pushed through vicious anti-semitic laws that marginalized Italian Jews and eventually led to the deaths of more than 9,000 in German concentration camps.

The alliance with Germany was to be Mussolini’s fatal error. Forced into a war for which Italy was distinctly under-prepared, the Italian army lost in Greece and north Africa. Mussolini was forced out by the king and set up a puppet government in northern Italy under German command. His end was an inglorious one. Dressed as a German soldier, he tried to escape to Switzerland, where 40 years earlier he had organized socialist unions. Communist partisans captured him on Lake Como. “We’ve got the big head!” they cried.

He was shot and brought to Milan for public display, in the same square where partisan bodies had been left as a warning to the resistance in 1944. Thousands crowded to spit on and kick Mussolini’s body. To calm them, he was hung up by his feet from a garage. So powerful had he been that the government felt unable to bury him until 1957, when his remains were handed over to his widow. They have since become part of a fascist shrine and popular tourist site.

Like Mussolini before him, Berlusconi has recently become both president of the council of ministers and foreign minister. The “big snake”, to use one of the more publishable of his many nicknames, embodies a concentration of political and economic power unparalleled in the west.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.