Vi propongo un articolo, anche simpatico, sulla crescita della fanciulla di casa Berlusconi. Una via di mezzo tra gossip, critica al papà e altro… siccome ritengo che le colpe dei padri non debbano ricadere sui figli… non commento. Anche se…
Barbara Berlusconi, with her tumbling blonde hair and air of a film star, emerges into a volley of paparazzi flashbulbs. While the scene has the trappings of a celebrity circus, the 24-year-old has, in fact, just attended a debate on “the role of business ethics in economic systems and the management of enterprises” at the Bocconi University. Ethics? Berlusconi?
Later, I put it to her that for the daughter of a man accused of abusing his power as Prime Minister and investigated for corruption to suggest that Italian business needs “ethical standards” is, er, slightly provocative. The Italian press evidently agrees, with one far-left paper noting that at a time when the defeated Italian Left is seen as ineffective, “the real opposition to Berlusconi is in his own home”.
“The conflict of interest issue needs regulation in this country, rules for correct conduct that must be applied and observed,” she says. “A return to ethics is the best answer to the current global financial crisis.”
Yes, but her father? “It is true that I am Berlusconi’s daughter, but this does not stop me being an independent person with a mind of my own. The Berlusconi name is esteemed by many, many people. A lot believe in him, many others feel a certain perplexity. I cannot deny my family origins. But I go my own way.”
We are in the Art Deco townhouse in Milan from which her father founded his business empire. In fact, we are in his study, a place few outsiders have visited. It is lined with his books, his sporting trophies, CDs and old-fashioned 78s. The walls are lined with Old Master views of Venice, some by Canaletto. “You see that hole in the middle of the conference table?” says Berlusconi (who refuses to sit in her father’s chair). “When we were little my sister Eleonora and I used to come down from the top floor where our bedrooms were, hide under the table during meetings, then pop up out of nowhere!” Did her father mind? “Oh, he was in on it. He thought it was great fun.”
When Berlusconi first talked about the need for ethics and “social responsibility” in business a couple of weeks ago she was dubbed a “leftwinger” and a “rebellious daughter” by the Italian press. Hardly surprising. Her father returned to power in May for the third time with a big majority, owns Italy’s three main commercial television stations and, as Prime Minister, has influence over RAI, the public broadcaster. He also owns a major publisher, Mondadori, Italy’s biggest advertising agency, Pubblitalia, and AC Milan football club. He has repeatedly clashed with Italy’s magistrates, whom he accuses of political bias against him, and as soon as he regained power he passed a law granting himself immunity from prosecution to try to scupper a trial in which he stands accused of bribing David Mills, his former tax lawyer and the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister.
No matter. “When I began making public statements about conflict of interest,” says Berlusconi, “my father complimented me: ‘Barbara, what you said was true, I’m proud of you’.” In the Anglo-Saxon world, she says, “if you are the children of the prime minister or president, you must appear very close, very united, but it is all a bit surreal - a sort of front, a façade. We don’t have to do that, and nobody has asked me to do that. So I feel quite free to say what I think.”
Berlusconi is emerging as a future business leader in her own right. With some sons and daughters of Italy’s elite (including Francesca Versace, heir to the fashion house, and Geronimo La Russa, the son of Italy’s Defence Minister) she has set up Milano Young to “give the young a voice” and demand an injection of idealism into a corrupt and greedy world. It has enlisted the help of senior academics to organise the debate at the Bocconi, to delve into business ethics.
She has said in the past that she would like to help to run Mondadori, where she was an intern. Isn’t that a “conflict of interest”? “Oh, but it has a high degree of autonomy, although the majority share is my father’s. And the experience that I have, I have thanks to him. You have to put things on different levels. I am proud to be a Berlusconi. I thank my father for all that he has done for me.”
Berlusconi and her siblings (Luigi, 20, and Eleonora, 22) are the children of their father’s second marriage, to the former actress Veronica Lario, whom he met while still married to Carla dall’Oglio. He wed Lario in 1990. The children of his first marriage, Marina, 42, and Pier Silvio, 40, are senior executives in his Fininvest holding company and Mediaset TV empire, and Marina is on the board of Mediobanca, the heart of Milan’s financial power structure.Barbara is the first of Lario’s children to follow suit: she got a place on the Fininvest board five years ago, aged 19. But she is displaying the independent-mindedness of her mother, who has for years taken separate holidays from her husband, lives in her own mansion outside Milan and once hinted that she voted for the centre-left, not her husband’s Forza Italia party.
Berlusconi says her father “has always been a tireless worker, so never had much time to spend with the family. He came home on Sundays, so bringing up the family fell to my mother, an exceptional woman, extremely intelligent and well balanced. She has always fought for the family, and her own ideas and decisions.”
Berlusconi has a one-year-old son, Alessandro, by her partner Giorgio Valaguzza, a banker eight years her senior who works in London. They have an apartment in Milan and at weekends she goes to London with the baby or Valaguzza comes to Italy. When she is working or studying - she graduates next year in philosophy at the San Raffaele University in Milan - she leaves Alessandro with her mother “when I possibly can. I don’t like the idea of having children and not bringing them up yourself.”
At the Bocconi conference Maurizio Dallocchio, who holds the Lehman Brothers chair of management finance, quoted George Soros to the effect that businesses often pay only lip service to codes of conduct because they involve “significant costs”. Does she agree? “Absolutely. One of the reasons managers often do not apply ethical standards is that they are used to having to increase their turnover in the shortest time possible. The market itself forces them to focus on profit at the expense of long-term vision. There is a lot of selfishness and egoism.”
Greed and selfishness could hardly be more topical, she notes, though Milano Young began planning its campaign months ago. Are we witnessing a crisis of capitalism as such? “No, there are many reasons for the current crisis. In its origins capitalism was a force for moral good, it was based on healthy competition, but the rules of the game are no longer respected. It is all about selfishness, and at that point it is no longer true capitalism. The great ideologies have failed, and values have become fragmented. We are the post-ideological generation.”
So is there a danger that this vacuum will be filled by an authoritarian figure? The Italian Left and some Roman Catholics, after all, have accused the Government of right-wing authoritarianism for governing by special decree and cracking down on Gypsies and illegal immigrants. “I don’t see a danger of authoritarianism. We are not talking about dictatorship. But we need a strong government for reforms, especially labour market reforms, which Italy desperately needs but can’t manage to achieve.”
The problem, she says, is that people are bombarded with information but no longer know what to believe. “You read one thing in one newspaper and the exact opposite in another. I am not talking about opinion and comment, but about the news itself. The same news is reported in completely different ways. This leads to a lack of trust in anything anyone says or proposes, a feeling of insecurity and uncertainty.”
Italy’s problems are compounded, she says, by the lack of a meritocracy. “Everything still works on personal ‘recommendation’; young people who deserve a job don’t get it if they don’t know the right people. People who don’t work properly still keep jobs for life. Protection of workers is of the highest importance, but it makes the whole labour market much too static.”
Berlusconi hit the headlines before she made her stance on ethics. In Paris in 2001 she was photographed leaving a debs ball dressed in Chanel, and two years ago her father was said to have paid €20,000 (£15,000) to keep a photograph of her outside a Milan nightclub out of the papers. It’s a sign of her maturity that the tongue stud mentioned in an Italian newspaper three years ago has gone. “It is amazing how much one changes in such a short time,” she says. “I see the world in a different way now. I’ve grown up.”
Basta che non cresci come tuo padre!
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