Mr. Berlusconi's Government poses a serious threat to both civil liberties and democracy in Italy. It has also shown itself to present a serious problem for Europe. Hubrys dominandi seems to have rendered Italy's Prime Minister incapable even of a minimal sense of boundaries, and of his limits.

The troubling fact is that traditional methods of containing power do not seem to be effective any longer. The reason for their impotence cannot be blamed on Italy's constitutional devices, which are good and well conceived. Rather, it arises from factors of personality and character, which, by their very nature, are difficult either to change or to restrain. Simply put, constitutional counter-weights as well as judicial and institutional containments function only as long as those who govern are willing to respect them, i.e. only insofar as the formal constitution and the material constitution coincide. It is this relationship that has been breached in Italy.

The rules that govern the country have become subservient one simple purpose: the exercise and preservation of power on behalf of the interests and personal well-being of those who currently hold it. Here lies the despotic wound from which Italian democracy suffers today.

It is, to be sure, a wound that was inflicted with the support of the majority of Italian voters. However, it is important to acknowledge that this public opinion is not innocently derived: it has been formed, in large part, by the majority's submission to the direct and unopposed control of the media by the very leader of the Italian Government. How free are the television networks and the newspaper headlines in Italy? Clearly, the prime minister has unleashed everything he has in a personal campaign against his opponents.

For this reason, it is misleading to speak of the tyranny of the majority. It is always a minority that leads the political game in a representative government - a fact well known to democrats of all times. This is an extremely important consideration for Italian democracy, where the risk to civil liberties - first and foremost, the freedom to form and express ideas - comes from the few, who seem to regard these freedoms as obstacles to maintaining the passive support of the many. Citizens are reduced to mere spectators, and to make things even worse, the spectacle in which they participate is studiously manipulated and impoverished. Italians - 80% of whom rely on television for their information - live in a state that is like a mediated autarchy: they are closed off to the world by their own country and closed off to what the outside world thinks and writes about them. This is the grave situation in which Italian democracy finds itself.

The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, considers and treats Italy like his personal playground. He surrounds himself with domestic or domesticated collaborators who busy themselves with dismissing anyone suspected of dissent, who manufacture news with the aim of hiding the truth from the citizenry, and pass laws to accommodate the needs of their master; with performers who brighten his life; with ministers who, like the viziers of old, crank out policies that obliterate public issues such as schools and health, and divert resources from where and for what reason no one knows. For a system sustained on passive consent to work smoothly, dissent must be marginalized by all available means, from the market to strategies of blackmail and coercion. Its objective is to intimidate and reduce to silence whoever still thinks freely until they are little more than yes-men and yes-women.

Such tactics are self-evidently signs of impotence rather than strength, but for whoever suffers their effects this "impotence" is disastrous. Now, it is beyond doubt that il Popolo delle Liberta [the Prime Minister's party] includes many liberals - people convinced that civil rights are too precious to be sacrificed to any majority decision. How can they remain silent? How do they not understand that their security depends on the defense of the Italian written constitution? It is said that constitutions are written when a people is sober in anticipation of future episodes of political inebriation. Liberals have wanted to bind the will of the majority with constitutions because they are pessimistic enough to contemplate the possibility that the majority would, in a moment of passion, steer the country into tumultuous seas. Italian liberals fail to see that Italy today has put itself into stormy waters, battered on one side by dangerous waves of racism and intolerance and on the other by a leader who is contemptuous of the most basic rights. The full-frontal attack on the daily newspapers that do not comply with Mr. Berlusconi's will and the harsh criticism directed at the foreign press is a danger that no serious liberal can underestimate.

There are many defense strategies against this excessive power. In the first place, the political opposition should shake itself out of its slumber of self-centered invectives and undertake effective political action. It must promote, in a unified discourse, a political alternative that is capable of mobilizing the citizens in public demonstrations that cry aloud for truth and justice. Second, the opposition should make use of all the available juridical instruments in both the Italian state and the European Union to bring the Italian case before the European parliament and the European Court of Justice. Finally, it should put in motion all instruments for generating free opinions that are available in alternative media, from the web via newspapers to associations within civil society.

Italian democracy is in a state of emergency. As Italian citizens we must reclaim our civic dignity from this state of docility and subjugation. And it is our written constitution that legitimates us to do what we must in order to defend it.