There are a couple of ways that could go.
Berlusconi may play the great man, the strong man, that implements Peronist style right wing populism, or left fascism in Italy. He may implement "reforms" and actually force a settlement which gives some relief on certain sectors, perhaps electorally important groups like small farmers and small business, industrial workers. It would be very easy, considering how bad things are, to give back a little, and create a massive mythology around his personality cult.
After all, many of the European Nazi's and Italy's fascist's spent much of the Cold War years making fortunes in South America. Peron's Argentina, while harboring many of the worst Nazis and fascists was also an experiment, a continuation of the fascist project. Franco in Spain, remained neutral, throughout WWII because he had much better sense of the geopolitical reality and thought Hitler crazy for taking on England and then Russia. Peron had a popular base amongst workers and peasants and based his philosophy of government on Mussolini.
If anything, now, we have a smarter and more subtle fascism, and its very much in the Peron mold.
I heard an Undercurrents journalist while interviewing Richard Wolf describe Berlusconi as a center-right politician. If so, he is also left fascist, hence a Peronist.
Another way it could go in Italy, is Berlusconi to completely slam the austerity program crushing down, so terrifyingly powerfully that escape from can only come from negotiating and buying exceptions via the elaborate and extensive, often ancient patronage systems of the the state, the mafia, the church.
Berlusconi is a media mogul, propagandist in chief, and main actor and could carefully manage an Italian Tea Party style narrative that scape-goats typical targets; immigrants, a-socials (unemployed, mentally ill, homeless), unionists, radicals, intellectuals etc. You know the routine. A very special place will be kept in this narrative for Communists and a special place in Berlusconi's Austerity Play for the Anarchist and the Black Bloc.
Since the institutions of the left have so comprehensively crushed, many young people are drawn to the sensational, emotionally resonant, immediate group activities of occupations, rallies, direct actions, encampments.
With all the realizations of the terrifying insanity of the world today, the need for outlets for action is overwhelming. Since there is little in social economic frameworks for creative and realistic actions, the instant gratification of direct action gives certain relief, and the consequences for failed tactics can always be deferred to the police repression, the violence of the system etc, making self-reflection impossible or at least less attractive then proper attribution.
Totalitarian anarchist theories that explain that industrial civilization itself is the problem are taking hold amongst the environmentally concious radical young - authors such as Derrick Jenson - and so smashing the state is no longer the end game. Its industrial technology also. This kind of thinking is a short-cut for actually thinking, its apocalyptic, totalitarian and millenarian. This totalitarian anarchism provides a framework that justifies any kind of destructive act against "industrial civilization".
In many ways it shares much of fascism. An anti-intellectualism, a romantic idealism about a return to a past perfection by destroying the corrupt present. The creation of a super human through a period of trials and tribulation. A festish for violence, destruction, purity. An unwillingess to compromise. A totalistic worldview impervious to alternatives and to inquiry. An idealization of past martyrs and a canon stripped of all nuance and context.
As in the anti-communist stay-behind armies of NATO's Gladio network, the Strategy of Tension in the 60s and 70s, and then the microcosm of the Genoa G8 where the spectacle of a compromised, infiltrated & provoked Black Bloc committing an orgy of indiscriminate property damage, often with the police looking on, indeed supervising. The product of the strategy of tension, is the appearance (and sometimes reality) of obvious, spectacular, terrifying, other-worldly, uncompromising leftist political violence.
With leftist institutions, frameworks being so weak, it will be difficult to absorb the increased pressures of austerity and very easy for provocations to escalate into a cycle of political violence. As the political violence escalates so does the tension in the community and polarization continues into extremis. With no end in sight to the troubles on top of austerity, after a while, austerity with an oppressive peace starts to look like a fond memory, an ideal time. Like many in USSR now fondly remember a more peaceful, if oppressive time.
As members of the Black Bloc at Genoa G8 say - you have to read the translations and subtitles - " we felt like we where on a stage... on reflection I feel violated, like we had been used, that we had been in some kind of trap".. the Black Bloc, the more peaceful Wombles, where drawn into a spectacle, a gladitorial match between the forces of order and the forces of chaos/anarchy/communism.
At the end of the Genoa G8, the property damage was so great, the video of rioting, removed of all context, so spectacular, the mainstream narrative so deceptive, emotive and patronizing. The police raid of the Genoa Social Forum, which was the beginning of the European Social Forum, an extenstion of the World Social Forum, was done with fascist cops singing Mussoloni era songs, with fascist ringtones on the phones, talking about Mussoloni and Pinochet, while they proceeded to beat violently and torture journalists, academics, intellectuals, lawyers. They took all the computer disks and video tapes, of the Genoa Social Forum and also the only systematic records of the police violence during the protests.
Berlusconi, in parliament, claimed the Genoa Social Forum raid, and beatings, was police revenge against violent protestors, which had been coordinated and controlled by the Genoa Social Forum. As a bizarre projection of their own obsession with control and coordination, hall marks of right-wing totalitrianism, they accused the Genoa Social Forum of all of the property damage, of provoking the honest police into violence, understandble excesses.
At the end of the G8 protests, a poll was done of Italian TV viewers. It found, that most viewers thought the police had been too lenient. Reminscent of Fox News, the more you watch the less you know.
The spokesmen for the Genoa Social Forum, is a European Parliamentarian to this day, and is a trade delegate to the US. He has just released a book in Italian unfortunately. Can I suggest that the East Bay Social Forum get him to come and speak? Can someone translate extracts from the book and publish it widely ? can Doug do an interview? http://www.vittorioagnoletto.it/ L'eclisse della democrazia. Le verità nascoste sul G8 2001 a Genova http://books.google.com/books?id=ESQ5DHlasJYC&lpg=PA1&dq=Vittorio%20Agnoletto&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Agnoletto
I think that the reason there is so very little published on the Genoa G8 from a radical and critical perspective, because it was such a terrifying defeat which shattered nearly all the basic tenets of strategy and tactics, such as diversity of tactics, spectatular media stunts as political statements, property damage as anti-capiatlist statement and the Trojan Horse of the Black Bloc.
The Genoa was such a huge fuck up for the left, and anarchists especially, especially the Black Bloc, that they dont want to face up to it, wouldnt want to write-up a proper analysis. An Anarchist book called, How Anarchists Are Tools for the Fascist State-Capitalist would not be a best seller at the Anarchist Fair.
The Genoa G8 is a microcosm of counter-revolutionary violence, and the anrchist tactic of property damanage and the black bloc, while maybe successful by themselves, in the context of mass peaceful rallies and counter-summits like the social forums, allow the full force of oppression to reign down and destroy any development of alternatives. Riot porn, black bloc, property damage take resources - activists, energy, attention - away from the boring work of policy, planning, discussion and the plain old business of political-economics, and redirect it confrontation and cycles of provocation, the spectactle of contestation. Then the violent reaction of the state to the manifestation of protest - with its extreme elements of Black Bloc, property damage etc - is then directed to the alternative creation institutions like the Genoa Social Forum, or in the context of the Occupys, the demands, coalitions, programs, actions etc.