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that ‘popular’ imagery diffused by a commercial media system and focused essentially
on entertainment, sport and their values. His attention to ‘what people want’, expressed
through survey research,is part of this populist attitude.

Being the owner of the Fininvest group was, of course, an important ingredient in his
victory, but less than usually thought. As Mazzoleni has stressed, the image of the new
‘Big Brother’, so diffused in Italian and foreign media, is an exaggeration: Berlusconi won
because he was able, through professionalised skills, to make use of all the
opportunities offered by the new mass media system. In this regard, it has to be
stressed that his use of television adverts has been overestimated: after the initial
period of his 1994 campaign, during which he produced an enormous number of
political ads,they were forbidden by law.

As Holtz-Bacha has shown in relation to the German case (Holtz-Bacha, 2002) and by
Jones in the context of the British case (Jones, 1997), campaign centralisation is another
important feature of the process of political communication professionalisation. In the
case of Berlusconi, this was also linked to the highly personalised campaign which he
inaugurated.The manner in which he centralised his campaign was taken directly from
every typical business organisation seeking to obtain the greatest profit possible by
means of a centralised strategy. A good example of this in Berlusconi’s case is the way
that he used to meet all his consultants and all the top leaders of his party organisation
on exactly the same day, Friday, and in the same place, his home headquarters, Arcore,
where he used to meet with the top officials of Fininvest when he was still in charge of
the company.This meeting, called ‘Il Tavolo per l’Italia’, (The Table for Italy), was the place
where all the main decisions regarding his 2001 campaign and later campaigns were
taken. There is no doubt that this is another example of ‘il partito azienda’ and the way
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
in which Berlusconi managed to transfer the main principles of company management
into the party organisation. He placed within his campaign organisation, and then
within his party organisation, the professional people (mainly pollsters and media men)
4
who were already working in his company. In this sense, Berlusconi did not collaborate
in expanding political professionalism by creating new professional figures; he used
already available people to establish his marketing strategy.

In many ways, Forza Italia’s candidates followed Berlusconi’s path but to some degree,
as we shall see later on, they also contributed to enlarging the world of political
professionalism. First of all, as their leader demonstrated, they saw the importance of
political marketing and therefore promoted many surveys, so making the profession of
political pollsters more important in all those regions and cities in which they were
running. Secondly, as they mostly came from outside the realm of politics, they needed
electoral teams that actually did not exist at all.They too needed advertisers,organisers,
press agents and the like.

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