cal leadership is one of those features.
In the case of Mussolini, charisma did not prove instrumental to his rise to power, at least in the traditional sense. He built an audience through his newspaper articles, then used his growing popularity to gain political power. His rise concluded in October 1922 when he became Prime Minister of Italy. To get that job Mussolini led ôa gang of truculent and ambitious men who wanted power, and who were backed by some intelligent and influential members of society[.]ö
Public opinion initially mattered little to Mussolini, but it soon became important to him after he discovered the value of manipulating the public. He found that by combining his newspaper tactics with the power of the state, he could make people believe anything. Though Mussolini lacked principles and often publicly contradicted himself, his propaganda apparatus always steered popular beliefs in his favor. Mussolini co-opted journalists by paying high salaries, and they responded in kind. His propaganda machine proved so effective that he remained personally popular even at the time of his fall in 1943.
The propaganda apparatus offered a deliberately false image of Mussolini. The party created a portrayal of him ôas a leader of vast intelligence, personal magnetism, and profound humanity: a man of immense power who was admired and feared by the whole civilized world.ö The Italian people believed this image, despite ample evidence to the contrary (such as Mussolini's kowtowing to Hitler). The propaganda machine proved so effective that many foreign governments also believed the image (or were too timid to challenge him), allowing Mussolini to pursue a belligerent foreign policy even though he lacked the commensurate military power.
Charismatic leadership is not limited to fascist regimes such as Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Marxist-Leninist systems such as North Korea and Romania also hav...