Millions of Italians will focus their attention on Wednesday on Milan’s great cathedral, as Silvio Berlusconi is given a state funeral in the city he made his power base for over 30 years. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who is expected to attend, has already paid tribute to the original populist leader, who brought Italy’s far right in from the cold in the 1990s. Her thoughts may now be starting to turn to the new political possibilities that the death of Mr Berlusconi at the age of 86 has opened up.
One of the many baleful consequences of the Berlusconi era was the re-emergence of the far right in Italian public life. The tycoon entered politics for cynical reasons – primarily to use power to stymie legal investigations into his media empire. But in order to win power in 1994, his centre right Forza Italia party (FI) joined forces with the National Alliance (AN). A successor party to the pro-Mussolini Italian Social Movement, the AN became a junior coalition partner in government. When Mr Berlusconi triumphed again in 2008, he made Ms Meloni, then an AN deputy, the youngest minister in Italian history.
