Silvio Berlusconi, the longest serving Italian Prime Minister, died in 2023 at the age of 86. Berlusconi was a self made billionaire real-estate/ media magnate, who used his personal wealth and influence over the media to become a politician later in life. Despite being Italy’s longest-serving postwar Prime Minister, his premiership ended in sex scandals, a debt crisis and convictions for tax fraud. He courted populist admiration form large parts of the electorate and criticism from the political/ judicial elite in equal measure. This obituary seeks to cover some of the highlights and lowlights of a colour life.
In his early life, Berlusconi was born into a modest middle-class Milan family in 1936, and educated at a Roman Catholic boarding school where he displayed precocious entrepreneurial flare by completing his classmates’ homework for a fee. He paid for his tuition at Milan university by selling vacuum cleaners, photographing social events and running a band that played on summer cruise ships. Berlusconi was a singer who was particularly fond of Neapolitan love songs.
In his early career, he went into business in the 1960s with a series of real estate projects(Milano 1 and 2), which saw him buy cheap agricultural land around Milan, and redevelop it in to commercial/ residential real estate with the support of local politicians. It was never clear how such a young man secured funding for these projects, whether it was through tax exiles in Switzerland or possibly the Mafia, but they turned out to be highly lucrative. In the mid-1980s, Berlusconi, as the Italian media industry deregulated, he diversified in to media, emerging as Italy’s leading commercial TV operator, partly by exploiting his friendship with Bettino Craxi, a socialist Prime Minister (who later fled to Tunisia after being convicted of corruption). Berlusconi’s combination of quiz shows, American films, and light programming for housewives, threaded with catchy advertisements and in evening prime time with scantily clad hostesses, proved a winning formula. It was a sharp contrast to the traditional state owned channels like RAI. His media empire include 3 of Italy’s 4 commercial networks (reaching 90% of the population), 2 national newspapers, the country’s largest film production firm, 50 periodicals and Milan football club.
Berlusconi entered politics in 1994 at the age of 57 using his wealth to create a new political party named Forza Italia (“Come on, Italy”) after a football fans’ chant, which was created by his advertising agency, Publitalia. He benefited from the collapse of Italy’s discredited political party system and swept to victory in the general election of March 1994. Berlusconi proved to be masterful at winning general elections in 1994, 2001 and 2008 which allowed him to govern Italy for nine years, the longest in the post-war period. However his economic legacy as Prime Minister was mixed, as he was unable to reform unions and the economy, in particular during the 2011 eurozone crisis when Italy was on the edge of bankruptcy. His political legacy in Italy led to the breakup of the 2 party (SPD and CDU) dominance in Italy and pioneered a new form of “anti-politics” - rash and, on occasions outrageous. In 2003, he compared the now German Prime Minister (Olaf Scholz), with a concentration camp guard, said Italian judges were “mentally disturbed” and appeared to defend Mussolini’s fascist regime. This preceded a new style of politics paving the way for charismatic rightwing politicians like Matteo Renzi in 2014 and Giorgia Meloni in 2022. Berlusconi also foreshadowed the rise of other rich businessmen who combined a rightwing message with defiance of the legal system, such as Trump and former Czech premier Andrej Babiš.
Berlusconi courted controversy, throughout these years, Berlusconi faced hundreds of investigations by Italian judges into his business affairs, with allegations ranging from tax fraud and false accounting to bribery of judges and illegal political party financing. Until 2013 Berlusconi, who denounced his pursuers as leftwing conspirators, was never found definitively guilty in all his many trials. In that year, however, Italy’s highest court upheld his conviction for tax fraud, which prompted his expulsion from the Senate, parliament’s upper house. He did not serve the prison term to which he was sentenced, but performed a year of community service in an old people’s home. His political career was also impacted by a colourful extra-curricular life, with high profile plastic surgery and hair transplant. During his 2008-2011 premiership, he was accused of hosting “bunga bunga” sex parties at his villa near Milan and affairs with young women a quarter his age. He was convicted, but later exonerated, of charges that he had paid for sex with a teenage Moroccan-born belly-dancer, known by her stage name as “Ruby the heart-stealer”.
Foreign observers have often asked how Italians could possibly elect as their leader – not once, not twice, but three times – a man widely viewed outside Italy as a buffoon, or worse. However Italians have always loved a winner and he was the embodiment of self-made success.
