Zizek on Berlusconi

Berlusconi is a significant figure and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist poplarism, Berlusconi's great achievement has been to reconcile the two.  The wager behind Berlusconi's vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I'm attracted to other women. Yet we shouldn't be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency.

Zizek on Ahmadinejad

Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor but a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clowning posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the ayatollahs. His demagogic distribution of crumbs to the poor shouldn't deceive us: he has the backing not only of the organs of police repression and a very Westernised PR apparatus.  He is also supported by a powerful new class of Iranians who have become rich thanks to the regime's corruption - the Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia but a mega-corporation, the most powerful centre of wealth in the country.