No politician has shaped Italy like Silvio Berlusconi since the early 1990s. He always caused strange moments – and at the same time soiled his career with all kinds of scandals.
A politician’s life is hardly enough for all of Silvio Berlusconi’s ups and downs, triumphs and bankruptcies, scandals and achievements, crashes and comebacks. He was a tearjerker on a cruise ship, real estate and media tycoon, football official, party founder, prime minister, convicted tax fraudster and, despite all the scandal and faux pas, a hero to some Italians to the end. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” Berlusconi once said of himself in 2006. Many simply saw him as the prototype of a populist.
No one else has shaped and changed Italy for decades like the vain, egocentric and often embarrassing man from Milan. Berlusconi died on Monday in a Milan hospital at the age of 86.
He was always laughed at and ridiculed abroad, but he couldn’t be beaten at home. “Berlusconism” – his political appearance had its own name. With a mixture of opportunism, audacity, machismo, but also a feeling for moods in the country and the great influence of his TV stations, the law graduate and self-made billionaire rose to the top.
Berlusconi has been head of government four times, spending a total of more than nine years in the Palazzo Chigi – no other prime minister in the Italian republic has been prime minister since 1946. With a number of scandals and legal proceedings, however, he soiled his own political legacy. Above all, the so-called Bunga-Bunga affair involving parties with women, some of whom were underage, in his private villa will always be associated with the politician, known as the “Cavaliere” (knight), in the memories of Italians and abroad.
Also on the road as an entertainer
Berlusconi was born in Milan on September 29, 1936, the son of a bank clerk and a housewife. He studied law and worked as an entertainer on cruise ships. His rise began in the construction industry in the 1960s. In the 70s and 80s he then discovered the television market for himself. He founded his own TV station, which he later used to get into politics.
The fact that he also bought AC Milan at the same time and lifted them to the top of European football reinforced many in 1994’s view that Berlusconi was a winner and a savior of Italy.
The then 57-year-old won the general election in 1994, just ten weeks after the founding of the Forza Italia party, and formed his first centre-right government. Shortly before, the traditional party image in the Mediterranean country had imploded when investigations brought to light corruption and abuse of office on a large scale at the highest political level. Large parties like the Democrazia Cristiana disappeared, and Berlusconi seized the opportunity. His government only lasted a few months – but Berlusconi got a taste for it.
Former Prime Minister and EU Commissioner Mario Monti once called Berlusconi the “father of all populists”.
From 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2011, Berlusconi headed three other governments before his time in the Palazzo Chigi was over after a record total of 3,340 days. Shortly before that, it had already become known that the married man invited young women to his villa for private parties – the term “Bunga Bunga” was born. The world laughed at the 1.64 meter man – and was horrified. Years of proceedings before various courts followed. Berlusconi was acquitted of allegations of abuse of office and the promotion of prostitution by minors, as he was recently in a trial for bribing witnesses.
To the brink of national bankruptcy
Even worse than all sex scandals was the financial crisis, because of which Italy, just under Prime Minister Berlusconi, slid to the brink of national bankruptcy. Under pressure from international partners – and also from the then Chancellor Angela Merkel – he had to resign at the end of 2011. Another humiliation followed in 2013 when he was convicted of tax fraud. He was barred from parliament and from political office in principle in the years that followed.
He was not allowed to stand again until the 2019 European elections and made it into the EU Parliament. He stayed there until October 2022, when he was elected to the Italian Senate – the smaller of the two chambers of Parliament. He had to bury his dream of becoming president in early 2022. What a punchline that would have been: Silvio Berlusconi as Italy’s highest representative in the world, who can dissolve parliament and appoint or reject heads of government!
The highest office in the state would have suited the self-image of this man, who raised audacity to virtue and, critics said, permanently destroyed the image of women in Italy with his TV shows full of half-naked dancers and sexist remarks. “There is nobody in the world who can pretend that he can keep up with me,” Berlusconi once said of himself.
Snubbed Merkel with cell phone to her ear
In terms of entertainment value, that could be true. In the course of his long career, Berlusconi provided a number of sometimes strange, sometimes outrageous moments: In 2003 he jokingly suggested that the then deputy leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, play a role as a concentration camp guard in a film. In 2009 he snubbed Merkel at the NATO summit in Kehl when he got out of the car and then walked for several minutes along the banks of the Rhine with his mobile phone to his ear instead of greeting the astonished hostess.
At a Christmas party at the end of 2022, he promised the players of his new club AC Monza a bus full of prostitutes if they beat top teams like Juventus or Milan. His girlfriend Marta Fascina – who is more than 20 years younger than Berlusconi’s children from his first marriage – sat right next to the smirking club patron.
Abroad, many shook their heads at Berlusconi, who in 2013 the then SPD chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück called “a clown with a special testosterone boost”. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Italian made several comments in which he showed understanding for his good friend Vladimir Putin. These statements by a man of advanced age repeatedly brought the governing coalition to an explanation. Berlusconi remained undisputed in his party to the end – no wonder, since it was the “President” alone who kept the party together at all.
In 2010, on the sidelines of an EU summit, Silvio Berlusconi formulated his life motto as follows: “I’m a happy person, I love life and women. No one will make me change my lifestyle, I’m proud of it.” dpa
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