I wouldn't say I take pleasure in his demise but I feel relief. Italy dodged the bullet.

It's like the situation with Trump. So long as he as alive the Republican party is going to be out of its mind, sidelining conservatives with (at least some) honor like Mike Pence, Mitt Romney and such. So long as Trump is alive we're going to be afraid of a comeback but when it is over it is over.

Dodged which bullet?

I have never voted for Berlusconi, but he has been a minor figure in Italian politics since 2011, and in terms of actual policies implemented during his governments, he has done very little that I would call dangerous, crazy or ruinous.

Since the euro, there has been very little room for European countries to implement any kind of adventurous domestic and foreign policies, if you exclude France's shameful bombing of Libya.

Forza Italia (Berlusconi's party) was one of the main members of the European People's Party, certainly not a den of extremists.

Italy took the bullet straight in the heart, and Berlusconi is the very reason for the rebirth of fascists and the far right in Italy.

One could make a case that Emmanuel Macron has handed the next election to the national front or that by vacillating between Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbin Labour has enabled the UK to become a Tory-led one party state like Japan, Singapore or China.

Japan is not a one party state, and putting it with China is disingenuous at best. Saying things like that just make you look like a prat

There’s a continuum between “hypothetically there is competition but the competition almost never wins” (Japan, at one time I would have said Mexico), “politics is a cruel simulation of democracy which is manipulated so you know the competition never wins” (Singapore, but most of the world’s leaders are jealous) and “It isn’t even fair to call that a political party in the electoral sense” (China).

Contrast that to the U.S. where a party has only held the presidency for at most three terms since 1948 and that just once and where there is usually divided government, as much as Democrats and Republicans can claim the other side wins all the time, no party is so perpetually out of power that it can evade all blame for the way things are. Looking at Europe and sideways at the U.S. it seems almost like center left parties are doomed to be in some quantum superposition of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbin. By simply framing themselves as the surviving defenders of the welfare state, the far right wins.

The way elections work in the UK are skewed towards the Conservative party for geographical and political reasons. You can hardly blame Blair for that, especially considering Blair's three victories and 13 years of Labour majority is the best result Labour got in its entire history.

Corbyn? Maybe. He was always too divisive to be PM. Then again, maybe Labour needed a bit of correction after "New Labour".

Comparisons with China are ridiculous in any case.

---

I don't know the details of the situation in France exactly, but Macron is doing what he feels is needed. Maybe he's right, maybe not, but you can't forever hold of unpopular but needed reforms out of fear of populist parties that merely tell people what they want to hear.

You can criticise Berlusconi for anything, but accusing him to be a fascist it's probably the most false claim.

The person you are replying to never said that Berlusconi was a fascist (he wasn't), just that his rise to power helped enable the far right populism and legimitized/emboldened a lot of fascist thinkers. That's pretty much a fact.