Silvio Berlusconi, who has died aged 86, dominated the public life of his country in a way no Italian had done since the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He was the Republic’s longest-serving prime minister. But whereas he was brilliant at winning and holding power, the use he made of it was disastrous. The “Berlusconi decade” – he held power for eight of the years between 2001 and 2011 – will be remembered as a period in which the Italian economy virtually stood still.
Berlusconi’s influence extended far beyond politics and the economy. It can be argued that he gathered to himself more power than was ever wielded by one individual in a western democracy. At the height of his career he was Italy’s richest man, and there was almost no area of Italian life untouched by his influence. His business empire encompassed property and insurance, debt financing and retail interests. He was the chairman of his country’s league-topping football side.
But, above all, he and the members of his immediate family held sway over a media empire whose potential for influence on public opinion had no parallel in Europe. It included three of Italy’s four commercial networks, two large publishing houses, two national newspapers, the country’s largest film production and distribution firm, and 50 periodicals, including one of Italy’s two main weekly news magazines. Since the state-owned RAI’s three TV channels were also answerable to Berlusconi in his role as prime minister, he directly or indirectly influenced 90% of everything that was watched on television in a country where TV enjoyed disproportionate influence because so few people read its newspapers.
The importance Berlusconi attached to images was characteristic of a society that has invariably placed great stress on appearance. Always immaculately dressed, he sported a tan as unchanging as his smile. But, as he aged, it became increasingly difficult for him to project the image he sought, and in 2004 he invited widespread ridicule outside Italy by having first a facelift and then a hair transplant.
Berlusconi’s career can be seen as one long exercise in getting around obstacles that, in a society less tolerant of rule-breaking, would have stopped him long before he reached government. He constructed a national commercial television network in a country where the possibility had been considered illegal. He entered politics despite a breathtaking assortment of conflicting interests. He survived repeated attempts to have him put in jail for offences including the bribing of judges. He was found guilty on several occasions. Some of his convictions were overturned on appeal. But in the remaining cases, he was saved from the consequences of his dishonesty by a statute of limitations.
In a way that was reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher, he cut across class barriers to construct an ample majority for the right. But, unlike his fellow conservative, he was never fully a politician. Indeed, his admirers credited him with pioneering a form of “anti-politics”. Certainly Berlusconi could be rash, tactless and, on occasions, outrageous. In a period of less than two months in 2003, he compared a German MEP with a concentration camp guard, said Italian judges were “mentally disturbed” and appeared to defend Mussolini’s fascist regime. But, in several respects, he was a product of the established political order he appeared to be challenging.
His success was made possible by patronage from one of its most corrupt politicians, Bettino Craxi. He may also have benefited greatly from his membership of the secretive and conspiratorial P2 Masonic lodge. Berlusconi always claimed that his greatest achievement was to save Italy from communism at the 1994 elections. And Italian capitalism was indeed in deep crisis then. The collapse of the Christian Democrats and the socialists left business people without politicians who could oil the wheels of government for them. Of no one was this truer than Berlusconi, whose patron, Craxi, had fled the country.
The only sizeable movement left more or less unscathed by the scandals ravaging the old order was the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS), which had ditched Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. When he “came on to the pitch” (the archetypal example of his astute application of sporting terms to political life), Berlusconi joined a side with almost no players. Yet within just a few months his team had won, and its “captain” had accomplished at least two remarkable feats. One was to show for the first time that a politician with money and a firm grip on the mass media could win power without a traditional party rooted in an ideology. Berlusconi’s own party, Forza Italia (“Come on Italy”) was created by his advertising agency, Publitalia.
His other accomplishment was to mould a “new right” from the ruins of the postwar system. Apart from Forza Italia, it included Umberto Bossi’s regionalist Northern League and Gianfranco Fini’s MSI which, for the sake of political respectability, reinvented itself as a “post-fascist” National Alliance. Berlusconi’s coalition later took in the more conservative of the remaining Christian Democrats.
The man who for the best part of 20 years was the undisputed leader of the Italian right was born in a Milan suburb, the son of Luigi Berlusconi, a bank clerk, and his wife, Rosella (nee Bossi, though not related to Umberto). He provided early evidence of a talent for making money by ghostwriting essays for his fellow secondary school students. He went on to study law at university and paid for his tuition by selling vacuum cleaners, photographing social events and running a band that played on summer cruise ships. Berlusconi was the vocalist. He was particularly fond of Neapolitan love songs and later in life engaged a restaurant guitarist-singer from Naples to play for him and his guests. He and his resident minstrel made several CDs together.
After graduating in 1961, Berlusconi went straight into business, borrowing the money he needed to set up his first company, Edilnord, from the bank where his father worked. It was not long before he was engaged in a huge project, the development of Milano 2, a complex on the eastern outskirts of his home city that included 4,000 flats, a hotel and offices.
One of the enduring mysteries of Berlusconi’s career is how a young and largely untested property developer was able to get together the capital he needed. He himself refused to say. His adversaries suggested it came from the mafia. His supporters hinted that it was the undeclared savings of rich Milanese who would have otherwise stashed it in Swiss banks.
The roots of Berlusconi’s media empire lay in Milano 2 and a cable television station he set up for its residents, Telemilano. Dodging a law that allowed only the RAI to broadcast nationally, Berlusconi wove a network of local stations that simultaneously broadcast the same programmes. By 1984, when his friend Craxi sanctioned the ruse by decree, Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding company owned three channels: Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete 4. Two years later, he became chairman of Milan football club and under his indulgent stewardship it once again became one of the most triumphant sides in Europe. He sold the club in 2017 and took over Monza in 2018.
Berlusconi’s first experience of politics was less successful. His 1994 government collapsed before the year was out. Its efforts to curb the powers of the prosecutors who were harrying him provoked a national and international outcry. His attempts to reform the pension system prompted a national strike. And his coalition was beset by internal disagreement. After the prime minister was notified that Fininvest was under investigation for bribing tax officials – while he was hosting an international conference on organised crime – Bossi and his MPs defected to the opposition.
There were times over the next seven years in which it seemed highly likely that Berlusconi would never return to high office. But in 2001 he stormed back in a campaign won, not with a manifesto, but a contract and a biography. On a TV chat show, he flamboyantly signed a “contract with the Italian people” that listed his campaign pledges. As he did so, a skilfully crafted account of his life entitled An Italian Story was being delivered, at Berlusconi’s personal expense, to every household in the land.
His second stint as prime minister was the longest of any Italian politician since the second world war (though, because of a reshuffle in 2005, it technically comprised two governments). After decades of short-lived administrations, Berlusconi’s 2001-06 government marked a unique opportunity to relaunch a country whose economy was already stalling. Instead, he used it largely to deal with issues of personal concern.
Laws were passed that obstructed trans-European investigations (such as one launched into Berlusconi’s Spanish dealings), prevented Rete 4 being moved to satellite, undermined the independence of the prosecution service and provided Berlusconi himself with immunity from prosecution (though that one was overturned by the constitutional court). Pension and labour market reforms were enacted. But the government shied away from the other structural reforms Italy’s ailing economy so obviously needed. Towards the end of its life, moreover, it began to lose its grip on the public accounts.
Mounting concern over Berlusconi’s management of the economy and the public finances coincided with growing divisions in his governing majority. The conservative Christian Democrats became increasingly fractious. An election was due the following year, and as it became clear that the right had little chance of hanging on to power, Berlusconi embarked on a project that – more than any other – betrayed his contempt for the nation he claimed to love. He rammed through parliament an electoral law that tipped the odds in favour of the right and, at the same time, ensured the left would have difficulty in governing if it won.
This breathtakingly cynical legislation made it possible for the winning party to have a majority in the lower house, but not in the upper. There, the odds were in favour of parties, such as the Northern League, whose support was regionally concentrated. Even the politician who drafted it called it a porcata (a “load of rubbish”, but also a “dirty trick”).
The 2005 act did away with first-past-the-post rules that had given Italy both a relatively stable, two-party (or rather, two-alliance) system and single-member constituencies whose parliamentary representatives had an interest in responding to the concerns of their voters. Unsurprisingly, the new law opened a gulf between the electors and the elected that helps explain the revolt against traditional politics, and mainstream politicians, later spearheaded by the comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement. However, the immediate effect of the new electoral rules was slight. If the centre-left returned to power with only a two-seat majority in the Senate, it had less to do with the unfairness of the law than with Berlusconi’s genius for campaigning.
Throughout his career, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to monopolise the nation’s attention, often using shock tactics for the purpose. He opened the 2006 campaign by comparing himself to Jesus, and closed it by saying he could not believe the left would win because there were not “that many dickheads around”. In the event, he lost by barely 40,000 votes. And in one of the many ways in which Berlusconi prefigured Donald Trump, he refused to acknowledge defeat. It took almost a month to get him to resign.
The coalition under Romano Prodi that replaced Berlusconi’s government was probably doomed to be short-lived. And its members did not help by squabbling incessantly. But among the causes of its demise two years later was the defection of a senator who in 2013 told prosecutors Berlusconi had paid him €3m to do so.
To the renewed astonishment of Italy’s European partners, Berlusconi coasted to victory in the 2008 election.
More than ever before, foreigners 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. His media power and financial resources certainly accounted for a large part of the answer. But they were never the whole of it. Italians have always loved a winner and he was the embodiment of self-made success. He had a 70-room mansion outside Milan, a villa on the Costa Smeralda, a palazzo in Rome and about 20 other homes. In 1990, he had married the actor Veronica Lario (nee Miriam Bartolini), as his second wife. By the time of their wedding, they had already had a son and two daughters. He had also fathered a son and daughter by his first wife, Carla dall’Oglio, from whom he was divorced in 1985.
Berlusconi’s successful career appeared to offer Italians the hope that, with enough effort and intelligence, they too could escape the rigid curbs imposed on them by their society to have it all. His supporters also liked the way his gags and gaffes marked him out from the normal run of career politicians. But then he was a populist of genius. He was the first modern Italian politician to speak to voters in the language of the streets. Never one to shrink from oversimplifying an issue, he also knew how to push the emotional buttons that would get a response from his compatriots.
He was particularly adept at depicting politics in terms of the family. A scholarly analysis of his speeches concluded he adopted the role of the mamma: endlessly complaining about the sacrifices he made on behalf of his “children”, the electorate, to justify a possessive claim on their loyalty and affection in the form of votes. Perhaps most decisive, though, was Berlusconi’s shameless readiness to appeal to the voters’ basest, most anti-social instincts. His “dickheads” remark was one of many in which Berlusconi sent a coded message to Italians that, if they put him into office, he would not tax them too heavily and would take an indulgent approach to evasion. After 2008, however, the state of Italy’s public accounts, and the obligations imposed on it by membership of the euro, forced him to be more responsible. Nor was that the only promising thing about his fourth government.
Berlusconi had always claimed he had been prevented from carrying out a liberal revolution in Italy because of the obstruction of his allies, particularly the conservative Christian Democrats. But they had split from him in 2006, and the following year Berlusconi embarked on a campaign to forge a united Italian right. In the end, he succeeded only in merging his own party with the National Alliance. But the resulting movement, which he called the Freedom People (PdL), was the nearest thing modern Italy had seen to a mass conservative movement.
By the time of its inaugural congress in March 2009 even some of his most unyielding critics were admitting that he seemed to have learned something from the failure of his earlier governments. Some of his ministers were attempting genuine reforms: imposing changes on Italy’s sclerotic civil service and its hidebound, gerontocratic university system. Then, entirely because of Berlusconi, it all went horribly wrong.
It had long been clear that his marriage was in trouble. As far back as 2002, he had astonished a press conference by commenting on the good looks of his guest, the then Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and suggesting he might be of interest to Lario.
In 2007, she demanded a public apology after he openly flirted with Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl and glamour model who had been elected to parliament for his party. He gave the apology, but the following year in a move that left feminists open-mouthed he made Carfagna equal opportunities minister. The scandal over her appointment was to pale into insignificance, however, in comparison with what was to come. One theory was that it had to do with the death of Berlusconi’s beloved mother, Rosa, in 2008. She, it was said, had held him back from some of his greater follies and without her restraining influence he lost all sense of proportion and discretion.
The first sign of trouble came, once again, from Lario when she denounced as “shamelessly tacky” a scheme to put up a bevy of showgirls as PdL candidates for the European parliament. Days later, she announced through leaks to the press that she was seeking a divorce and accused her husband of “consorting with minors”. Her accusation brought to light Berlusconi’s never fully explained relationship with a Neapolitan teenager, Noemi Letizia. From then on, it was one sex scandal after another as the public learned of goings-on in the prime minister’s homes reminiscent of the later Roman empire.
First, there were claims that he had used his official plane to fly young women to his estate on the Costa Smeralda. Then came evidence of sex workers mingling with actresses and dancers at dinner parties in his Roman home (one even recorded her pillow talk with the prime minister, which was then put on the internet). But nothing was to be as damaging for Berlusconi as the investigation – and subsequent trial – centring on his relationship with a young Moroccan runaway, Karima el-Mahroug, who was 17 at the time she attended so-called “bunga bunga” parties at his mansion near Milan.
The sex scandals coincided with an accumulation of political and economic storm clouds. Impatient with Berlusconi’s undemocratic management of the PdL, his long-standing ally Fini called unsuccessfully for change before he was ejected, along with a small group of followers in late 2010. Their departure left Berlusconi with a wafer-thin majority, just as his government began to suffer the effects of the global economic crisis. His reaction to the US credit crunch of 2008 had been to insist it would not affect Italy. But the following year the economy shrank by 5.5%, and as 2010 progressed a growing number of Berlusconi’s compatriots began to realise they had been tricked. With the crisis spreading into the eurozone the following year, Berlusconi, his popularity ratings diving, repeatedly tried to avoid implementing the austerity measures demanded of him by the European institutions. Italy’s borrowing costs soared and his supporters grew increasingly restive.
By November 2011, no longer able to command a majority in the lower house of parliament, Berlusconi stepped down to make way for a non-party government headed by the former EU commissioner Mario Monti. Again, it seemed as if his political career was over. But that was to reckon without Berlusconi’s formidable resources and his vested interest in staying in politics, both as a way of keeping out of jail and safeguarding his companies. The following December, after watching as support drained from the PdL, Berlusconi snatched back the leadership, brought down the Monti government and forced an early election.
He did not lead the PdL back to government at the 2013 general election. But by reviving its partnership with the Northern League and promising to restore the proceeds of a much loathed tax on first homes, he saved it from eclipse. His rightwing alliance took enough seats to guarantee it an important role in the bargaining that followed. It ended in a left-right coalition headed by Enrico Letta. Once again, Berlusconi had made himself the arbiter of the Italian government’s fortunes. Or so he thought.
In the summer of 2013, Berlusconi’s legal difficulties turned from an irritant into a nightmare. In June, in a case brought against him because of his involvement with El-Mahroug, he was convicted of paying a juvenile sex worker and then misusing his official position to try to cover up their relationship. He was later acquitted of both charges on appeal.
But in August, his conviction in a less publicised trial involving his group’s trading activities was upheld. Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in jail for tax fraud. Partly because of an earlier amnesty, and partly because he was a first offender, he did not go to prison. But he did have to do community service in a home for elderly people.
Apparently furious with Letta for failing to protect him from the courts, Berlusconi tried to destroy him, as he had Monti. But his party’s ministers in the coalition refused to follow his orders and formed a new party, led by Berlusconi’s erstwhile heir apparent, Angelino Alfano. The rift highlighted the tycoon turned politician’s refusal to choose a political heir. Various successors were proclaimed, but each time Berlusconi’s giant ego got in the way.
Paradoxically, his warmest approval was reserved for an emerging rival: Matteo Renzi, of the centre-left Democratic party, who in early 2014 snatched power from Letta. Soon after, Renzi hatched a deal that pandered to the former prime minister’s vanity: Berlusconi would back the young leader’s ambitious programme of constitutional reform and thereby salvage his tattered reputation. He would emerge from the process as the godparent of a new Italy.
It was not to be. Renzi dumped him before the constitutional reform entered the decisive phase of its passage through parliament – a fateful decision because, without the support of Berlusconi’s party, which had reverted to its old name of Forza Italia, Renzi had to submit his proposals to a referendum, which he lost. By then, however, Berlusconi cut an increasingly baleful figure: the leader of a much-diminished party, surrounded by – critics said, hostage to – a coterie of hangers-on that included his new partner, Francesca Pascale, almost half a century his junior. As the results came in, showing Forza Italia struggling to get into double figures, Berlusconi suffered heart failure and later underwent surgery. It looked as if the curtain had finally come down on the longest running act in the variety show of European politics.
But that was to underestimate the man. Over the months that followed, Berlusconi moulded a new image for himself, as a soft-hearted grandfather – animal-loving and vegetarian, like his partner.
Forza Italia failed to gain any leverage at the 2018 general election, which ushered in a new kind of populism: that of the maverick Five Star Movement. Grillo’s followers were the senior partners in both the coalitions led by Giuseppe Conte that governed Italy until 2021. But Berlusconi’s party returned to power that year as part of a broadly based alliance in support of Conte’s successor, the former European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi.
Less than a year and half later, Berlusconi played a key role in bringing Draghi down. By then, the octogenarian TV tycoon had another improbably young partner, Pascale having left him and formed a partnership with another woman. Berlusconi’s new companion was Marta Fascina, a Forza Italia deputy just 33 years old at the time. Together, they hosted a lunch at one of the former prime minister’s many luxurious residences that sealed Draghi’s fate. Also at the table were Bossi’s successor as head of the League, Matteo Salvini, and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party with roots in neo-fascism that had been steadily eating into the League’s support.
At the general election that followed in 2022, their conservative alliance won an outright majority. But it was Meloni’s party that emerged with the largest number of votes and seats, and the right to take the prime ministership. Though she was significantly more reactionary than Berlusconi on many issues, Meloni, 40 years younger, had a very different conception of the role of women. Indeed, she once publicly criticised his “bunga bunga” parties.
It is profoundly ironic that with his last decisive political intervention, Berlusconi, the very embodiment of condescendingly patriarchal and sexist attitudes towards women, should have opened the way for Italy to acquire not only its first female prime minister, but one whom he found intolerably bossy.
Election to the European parliament in 2019 led to little after his health was affected by Covid-19. When he went into hospital with a lung infection in April he was found to have leukaemia.
He is survived by Marta and his children, Marina, Pier Silvio, Barbara, Eleonora and Luigi.
• Silvio Berlusconi, businessman and politician, born 29 September 1936; died 12 June 2023
