Italy held a national day of mourning for Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul who was Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since Mussolini, after his death this week. Thousands turned out for his state funeral – but the country is far from united on the man who remade Italian politics in his own image.
The one thing most would agree on is the scale of Berlusconi’s influence on Italy.
“I was born in 1984, so I’m the generation that grew up with Berlusconi,” says Davide Vampa, now a senior lecturer in politics at Aston University in Birmingham in the UK.
For Italians, he compares the shock of Berlusconi’s death to British people learning that the Queen had died.
“I think all Italian millennials can define ourselves as a kind of Berlusconi generation, even those who didn’t vote for him,” he says. “We were socialised politically in the era of Berlusconi.”
That era didn’t end with Berlusconi’s death on Monday at the age of 86, nor was it confined to politics.
Age of individualism
Before he founded his own party, Forza Italia (“Go Italy”), before he became prime minister or formed the right-wing coalition in power today, before the trials for tax fraud and corruption and paying minors for sex, Berlusconi was the man who brought commercial TV to Italy.
“His three private television channels were central to shaping the culture in the Nineties and the Noughties, through all sorts of cultural products from Japanese cartoons and rowdy talk shows and very vulgar TV guests to variety shows with show girls in skimpy dresses,” says Paolo Gerbaudo, an Italian sociologist and political theorist at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and King’s College London.
Over the 1970s and ‘80s, Berlusconi built a television empire dedicated to entertainment.
“He was appealing to Italians’ unconfessed desires, in a country that was still very Catholic and very conservative,” Gerbaudo says. “He was speaking to this emerging extreme individualism that carried an element of hedonism, an element of desire – for sex, for money, for power, for cars, for a luxurious lifestyle, villas and so on and so forth.”
He carried that individualism through to his politics. Invoking the small-state, low-tax, free-market reforms that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had brought to Britain and the United States the decade prior, Berlusconi first ran promising to liberalise Italy’s economy – which was floundering in the early 1990s after its post-war boom.
At the same time, a vast corruption scandal had tainted the traditional parties that had governed Italy since the end of World War II, and Berlusconi pitched himself as a clean break. He founded his party in December 1993; by March 1994, after months of TV spots on his channels, it had won a general election.
Politics as business
Berlusconi wouldn’t go on to enact many of the reforms he had promised during his three stints as prime minister between 1994 and 2011.
The policies he pursued – cuts in taxes, amnesties for evaders – were the ones that benefited his business interests, explains Gerbaudo, who describes Berlusconi as “first and foremost an entrepreneur”.
“His party was basically his company. He transformed a wing of his company into a political party,” he says.
His politics were opportunist, agrees Vampa, primarily designed to keep him in power. “Essentially Berlusconi used different issues just to advance his own political career and be more appealing to Italian voters, in a very effective way,” he says.
Untethered from ideology, he was free to adopt sometimes contradictory positions depending on the mood of the moment. These ranged, over the years, from railing against immigration to promising to refund property tax and offering pet owners free visits to the vet.
And it worked: even after he was forced to resign in 2011 at the height of a financial crisis he had failed to address, then convicted of tax fraud two years later and temporarily banned from public office, he continued to wield influence as the head of his party and a kingmaker on the centre-right.
The right reborn
The centre-right, in fact, was one of Berlusconi’s most significant contributions to Italian politics: as he liked to say himself, “we invented it”.
Right from the start, he did away with the cordon sanitaire that had kept parties with ties to fascism out of the mainstream since the end of World War II. Turning to the fringes for support, he positioned himself at the centre and formed electoral alliances with parties further – in some cases, much further – to the right.
Ultimately the parties that he invited into power would go on to overtake his own, with first the hard-right League and then the post-fascist Brothers of Italy winning more votes than Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in Italy’s last two elections.
But current prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s most right-wing leader since the fall of fascism and his one-time protégée, could hardly have got there without him. As Berlusconi bragged in 2019: “We brought [the League and the fascists] into government … We legitimised them.”
A populist pioneer
With his unabashed narcissism and casually offensive “gaffes”, Berlusconi might once have been seen as a uniquely Italian punchline. But subsequent developments have demonstrated that he was neither.
Vampa calls him a “proto-populist”: one of the first leaders in modern Europe to prove that personality could be more appealing than policies, and scandals could be brushed off by complaining of persecution by a vengeful establishment.
“Many politicians, especially on the right, learned many lessons about the fact that these days power is media power, that if you want to obtain consensus you need to control the media,” notes Gerbaudo.
“And he always managed to win with a smile. He showed that people hate sanctimony and a certain kind of moralism that the left threw at him more than corruption and theft.”
He points to Donald Trump as the most obvious example: “He really learned many lessons from Berlusconi about the power of celebrity [and] the use of very cynical imagery as a way to appeal to a disillusioned citizenry.”
Boris Johnson – like Berlusconi, happy to play the clown when it serves – also borrowed from his playbook, while Vladimir Putin, a personal friend of the Italian's, is similarly adept at distorting the narrative.
The king is dead, long live the king
Back in Italy, he leaves behind him a polarised political system and a fractured opposition that has struggled to define what it stands for, other than “not Berlusconi”.
But perhaps his most pervasive legacy for the “Berlusconi generation”, hundreds of thousands of whom have left Italy in the 30 years since he took power, is deep frustration with Italian politics and public life more broadly.
“His language and policies, many would say, damaged the democratic fabric of Italian society,” says Vampa. “Many people didn’t agree with his politics or his views, and many would argue that his actions actually damaged Italy, its democracy, its economy, and the role that minorities and women play in Italian society.”
Gerbaudo goes further: “Instead of correcting the ills or the deviations of a given society as statesmen are supposed to do, he did the exact opposite – he cultivated Italians’ vices, Italian distortions, leading to the very decline in society that we face today,” he laments.
Not everyone feels the same, as evidenced by the crowds of thousands lining the streets of Milan to wave him off.
Italian journalist Daniele de Luca didn’t support Berlusconi, only the football club he helped make one of the wealthiest and most successful in Europe, AC Milan. But he told RFI what he believes lay at the heart of his appeal.
“He was the man who convinced Italians that there could be a monarch, a king,” he says. “That’s a typically Italian attitude, to see in a single person the saviour of the country, a hero. And he exacerbated that tendency and paved the way for there to be one person in charge.”
By building an entire movement in his own image, Berlusconi left it without an obvious successor. That doesn’t mean it dies out with him.
As de Luca puts it: “Today lots of people are saying, ‘OK, Berlusconi is dead – but Berlusconi is inside of us.’”
