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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.