Money and politics, Italian style

At the end of 1993, Milan media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi announced his decision to enter politics. It took only three months for the richest Italian and his new political movement, Forza Italia, to win the election in March 1994. He got the support of the public, promising to change the political culture. But it never happened.

Some analysts later said that his entry into politics was Mr. Berlusconi's ultimate attempt to avoid investigation. It was no secret that Craxi was behind his enormous success.

Berlusconi was formally notified that he was under investigation for alleged bribery during the UN-sponsored conference on organized crime in Naples on Nov. 21, 1994, over which he presided as Italian prime minister.

The subsequent fall of Berlusconi's coalition opened the second act of Tangentopoli. Investigators slowly approached the final number of 25,000 inquiries on political corruption involving 5,000 people. One hundred members of the national parliament were indicted.

The number of court cases grew, but the number of final verdicts was very low. What followed was exactly what many analysts now are predicting in the Enron case: The complexity of the investigation developed into something so monstrous that it was too difficult for the average citizen to keep up with the facts. Public support lost its momentum. In early 1998, all investigations practically stopped.

As the leader of the opposition, Berlusconi started an open war with the Italian justice system, accusing the investigators of a communist plot, calling judges a "cancer of democracy" that had to be removed. Somebody in Rome had already compared his relationship with the law to the White House's problems with the General Accounting Office. With one substantial difference: Berlusconi had at his disposition his own TV network - the largest one in Italy - which he never hesitated to use.

Rep. Martin Meehan (D) of Massachusetts, a sponsor of campaign-finance overhaul, recently said, "Enron is the last straw that will produce a fair vote on campaign finance reform." In the early 1990s, many Italians thought the same about Tangentopoli, as shocking facts popped out of political closets daily.

But now, 10 years later, public opinion in Rome and Milan is much less unanimous on the theme of Tangentopoli. With Silvio Berlusconi back in office, there are many who would like to see the former investigators face justice themselves.

Yes, there is a common impression in Italy that the systematic corruption that led the country into Tangentopoli is greatly diminished. But none of the Italian political parties did anything to change the rules of the game. Will America learn the lessons Italians missed?

• Juraj Kittler is a journalist from Slovakia who worked as a political correspondent in Rome from 1992 to 1997.

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