Okay, this is very specific to my country, so I guess I have to explain things first: in the early 1980s, a list of names was discovered by the police of Italy in the house of a very powerful man at the time, Licio Gelli; this list had more than 900 names in it, up to and including those of Silvio Berlusconi (no explanation needed, really) and Victor Emmanuel of Savoy (the pretender to the throne of the Kingdom of Italy that had been abolished after the second World War).

All the people named in the list were members of an illegal, secret Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due; the lodge was, more or less, a parallel state, and was implicated directly or indirectly in most of the scandals, plots and acts of terrorism that happened in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy. Yes, acts of terrorism. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is actual history and proven fact.

The lodge had authored a document, the Plan for Democratic Rebirth, which called for the establishment of an authoritarian state in Italy, while maintaining the appearance of democracy; a summary of the document can be found here and, even though many of the people involved in the lodge were arrested, many others (up to and including the aforementioned Silvio Berlusconi) were not and, even though the lodge wasn't able to implement its Plan for Democratic Rebirth in full, many of their goals (the transformation of the country's political parties from ideology-driven affairs to something resembling the big tent parties of the US, the neutralization of the considerable power of the trade unions and the pursuit of neo-liberalism, the control of information and the dumbing down of the media, the depreciation of diplomas and degrees in order to create a mass of people willing to be overworked and underpaid just to eke out a living, etc.) have been achieved, especially during the heyday of Silvio Berlusconi's career as a politician, but also by other parties, both left wing and right wing.

Hell, we don't even have a left wing anymore over here, since the Partito Democratico is in the exact middle of the political spectrum and sold out to big business several years ago, while the actual left wing parties are Cold War relics that regurgitate orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory like it's 1968 while being completely ignorant of the fact that the world has changed.