‘Berlusconi is an incredible person who believes he can do anything’
Mario Cervi has witnessed and told the story of great events, from the Suez crisis to the colonels’ coup in Greece, and from Pinochet’s coup – he was one of three foreign correspondents in Santiago on the day President Salvador Allende died – to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (his first report for Il Giornale, of which he was editor from 1997 until 2001). He has written a number of studies, a biography of Eisenhower and, together with Montanelli, the last 13 volumes of «The History of the Twentieth Century» and «Italy at the Millennium.» At 81 he continues to write regularly, and has a political commentary page in Gente magazine. What is your opinion of Silvio Berlusconi? He’s an incredible person. He believes he can do anything. He has had successes nobody could have foreseen. But I don’t know if he can do everything he said he would. And if he doesn’t, the Italians might be disappointed. Berlusconi is the power behind Forza Italia; unlike the left, it wouldn’t exist without him. Isn’t it a bad thing that he controls so much of the media? It is a problem, but if people vote for him no one can do anything about it. There is no law prohibiting a media king from getting involved in politics. I think that when Berlusconi wanted to get into politics he should have sold the television stations. But it isn’t true that there’s lots of propaganda about Berlusconi. What is the level of Italian journalism? People have lost the habit of reading newspapers. In the past, the majority were illiterate but they had no influence, and it was the educated who made the laws and the revolutions; they carried the weight. Nowadays those who watch television are the new illiterate, even though they can read and write, and those who read newspapers are the educated who produce ideas.
