The many ambitions of Silvio Berlusconi

By Simon Bond

       The Italian government is attempting to curb the power of its home-grown media mogul and, albeit briefly, former president, Silvio Berlusconi. He has shamelessly used his three national television channels to boost his political career and flooded his stations with advertisements in praise of himself.
     Striking at the heart of his media empire, the government is planning a new law that provides "equality of opportunity in the media." The bill would prohibit political advertising for up to 70 days during election campaigns.
     The move follows the surge of success enjoyed during the recent European Parliamentary elections by Berlusconi's own political party, Forza Italia. Riding high on these results, observers are whispering that Berlusconi could have another shot at Italy's top job after the next general election, which is due to be held within the next two years.
     Berlusconi started his right-of-center populist movement from nothing in the wake of the scandals that brought down the old Christian Democratic establishment in the early 1990s. He led a government in 1994 that lasted only seven months and then went on to lose the general election in 1996. Although he has been widely viewed as a political write-off ever since, the Berlusconi spin machine is back in operation, arguing that he was not in power long enough to show what he is made of. Even Berlusconi's many legal problems--he has been convicted of bribery and false accounting, acquitted of similar charges, and has a couple of other trials coming up in September--do not appear to have politically harmed him. Further, and crucial in a soccer-obsessed country like Italy, Berlusconi's football club, AC Milan, won this year's Italian league title against all odds and this impressed a lot of people.
     At the height of the storm surrounding his political career, Berlusconi looked set to let Rupert Murdoch acquire control his $10 billion television group, Mediaset. At the last minute, Berlusconi changed his mind and held on to his TV channels. With his political career about to be reanimated this looks like it was a good call. Not only will his media and entertainment holdings provide an excellent launch pad for a political campaign, they are also at the heart of an industry-sector consolidation that is gripping Europe's media business.
      Mediaset has already formed an alliance with Germany's Kirch media group to establish a new European television company that combines the expertise in negotiating film and soccer rights of the German group with the Berlusconi's strong advertising operations. This new European partnership has already been extended to Spain, where Mediaset owns 25 percent of the Tele Cinco channel, and the new group is set to increase this shareholding.
       Mediaset is also thought to be keen to attract a French partner to the European television venture.
    Berlusconi is transforming his group into a large European media and entertainment company modelled on U.S. conglomerates like Disney and Time Warner.
       Along with Mediaset and Belusconi's holding company, Fininvest, he controls the Mondadori publishing company, the Medusa film production group, the AC Milan soccer club and the Italian branch of the Blockbuster video rental business. On top of this he is thought to looking at extending his movie distribution capability by building a number of multiplex cinemas throughout Italy.
    With such a diversifying spread of media, the Italian Government will soon have to look at a much wider set of political controls to keep Berlusconi's face out of public view in the run up to the national elections.

-Simon Bond writes from outside London.