In a strange bit of synergy, both the indictment of former U.S. President
Donald Trump and the death of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of
Italy took place this week. Berlusconi, arguably, was the O.G. of populist leaders whose political careers carried on through a cascade of scandals and criminal cases. Both are examples of how the weakening of mainstream political parties can open the field for charismatic outsiders with a populist bent. In the early 1990s, Italy’s national “clean hands” investigation that wide-ranging corruption had infected business, public works and politics, and found that the country’s political parties were largely financed by bribes. The two parties that had dominated Italian politics since the fall of fascism, the Christian
Democrats and the Socialists, collapsed after a wave of indictments. So did nearly every other established political party. “The party system that was the anchor of the
Democratic regime in the postwar period basically crumbled,” Ken Roberts, a Cornell University political scientist, a few years ago. “What you end up with is a political vacuum that gets filled by a populist outsider in Berlusconi.” That 2017 conversation with Roberts, notably, was focused on another country, where another corruption scandal was opening the path to power for another right-wing outsider:
Brazil, where an obscure lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro was just starting to gain national traction in the wake of . “I really worry that in cleaning it up, the whole system is going to crumble,” Roberts said at the time. “I really fear what a Brazilian Berlusconi is going to look like.” In another conversation this week, Roberts recalled that back then, most analysts did not yet take Bolsonaro seriously. “But he was beginning to stir, and my quote to you was in anticipation of his rise,” he said. “I think it holds up pretty well over time,” he added. A year after Roberts and I first spoke, Bolsonaro was elected president after running on a far-right platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage and for Brazil’s former
MILITARY dictatorship. As his term neared its close, he spent more than a year warning that he might not accept the results of the 2022
election if he failed to win. When he lost, he made baseless claims of fraud. A mob of his supporters eventually in Brasília, the capital, in a failed effort to prevent the candidate who won the vote, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office. Bolsonaro is now set to next week over his electoral fraud claims. Other examples of this pattern aren’t hard to find. In
Venezuela, a series of corruption scandals opened a power vacuum that Hugo Chávez easily filled with populist appeals, leading to to an authoritarian government that, by the time of , oversaw a country racked by crises. In Guatemala, after a corruption investigation forced President Otto Pérez Molina in 2015, he was replaced by Jimmy Morales, a charismatic television comedian with no political experience who ran on the slogan “not corrupt, nor a thief,” as president. When the U.N.-backed group that had investigated Molina began looking into Morales as well, he . The
United States has not had a massive corruption scandal that sent politicians to courtrooms and jail cells and decimated faith in its political parties. But, as I discussed in columns in April and May, Trump rose to power after the
Republican Party was profoundly weakened by other factors, including campaign finance laws that , and the rise of
Social Media that meant the party was for press and messaging access. That kind of institutional weakness creates an opening for outsider politicians who might once have been kept out of politics by robust political parties. But more specifically, it also privileges a certain type of candidate, who has celebrity name recognition (perhaps a celebrity entertainer like Morales, a famous businessman like Berlusconi, or one like Trump, who bridges both worlds), charisma, and a willingness to win votes and headlines by embracing positions that would be taboo for mainstream candidates. Unfortunately, it is rare for such politicians to also be good at building new, strong institutions to replace those whose decay enabled their rise to power. In Italy, Berlusconi presided over and helped maintain decades of weak coalition governments and political turmoil, not to mention the multiple corruption scandals he landed in. And that chaos looks set to outlive him. “Even in death,” my colleague Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief of The Times, , “Berlusconi had the power to potentially destabilize the political universe and Ms. Meloni’s governing coalition, of which his party, Forza Italia, is a .” Read past editions of the newsletter . If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up . Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters . I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to . You can also follow me .