Miracle In 100 Days.(World Affairs)

Byline: Jacopo Barigazzi

How Berlusconi brought order to chaotic Italy, and what comes next.

In his first 100 days in office, Silvio Berlusconi may have done the impossible: to a degree unprecedented in modern Italian history, he asserted control over this seemingly ungovernable nation. The opposition parties are mired in squabbling, and Berlusconi, now prime minister for the third time since 1994, has an approval rating of 55 percent--higher than Britain's Gordon Brown, France's Nicolas Sarkozy or Spain's Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

That anyone in Italy has managed to be so successful is surprising. More than most Western European countries, Italy has long been bedeviled by corruption and a system that gives disproportionate political weight to small parties. Berlusconi's predecessor, Romano Prodi, was stymied by his center-left party's tiny Senate majority and the government's fractious nine-party coalition. But Berlusconi, the 72-year-old media mogul, cannily exploited a 2005 electoral law that wiped out these small parties to win a surprise landslide victory from which the opposition is still trying to recover.

His center-right party now has 174 seats in the Senate (versus the left's 132) and while he enjoys something of a honeymoon period with the electorate, he has also wasted little time in consolidating his authority. One of his first acts: pushing through a bill that gives the top four national officeholders, including the prime minister himself, immunity from prosecution while in office. The bill passed overwhelmingly last month, and put an end to outstanding criminal proceedings against Berlusconi (which he and supporters say were politically driven).

That this new law was a possible conflict of interest did not go by unnoticed, but Italians are feeling too poor to pay it much attention. After 10 years of near-zero economic growth--Bank of America predicts 0.5 percent growth this year--they are demanding security, financial and otherwise. And Berlusconi is delivering, with an ...