The dead, especially those who lived as if they never had to die, take a long time to completely go away. Even more so, if your past life could also be a publishing or audiovisual business. In the case of Silvio Berlusconi, a master in this matter, the season has already been opened.
The doctor of Il Cavaliere He used to joke about his immortality. The magnate and former prime minister of Italy had overcome all kinds of health problems. But he had also achieved that, after dozens of sexual scandals and accusations of corruption, the only firm conviction for which he had to answer was that of tax fraud. The myth of his indestructibility, however, came to an end on June 12 at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, where he died at the age of 86. Almost a year later, his irreplaceable presence continues to float in the political and business air of Italy and now returns with more force through the publication of a book that vindicates his legacy and a series on Netflix that reconstructs in a surgical and fast-paced way, through three chapters, his arrival to power.
The first sequence of the series shows a young Silvio Berlusconi preparing for the interview on a set with his friend Mike Buongiorno. He is calm, he jokes. The presenter, who became close to the owner of the channel where the talk was broadcast, is familiar with him. Il Cavaliere, dressed in an elegant tuxedo, asks for his hair to be styled properly. When the green light on the camera turns on, Mike shoots: “You deal with television, film, distribution, construction, the publishing world, football… I don't know how you do it. But have you never thought about entering politics?” Berlusconi then responds: “I am a man of doing, so let me do well the job I know how to do, which is that of a businessman.” Evidently, shortly afterward he changed his mind.
Seeing The young Berlusconi (by Simone Manetti), it is impossible to imagine today's Italy without his presence and contribution. In every sense. His close friends parade through the images of the documentary series: Fedele Confalonieri (president of Mediaset), Marcello Dell'Utri (who was in prison convicted for a case that affected Berlusconi himself and never said another word), Adriano Galliani (his strong man in football) or the last secretary of the Communist Party, Achille Occhetto, who admits his defeat before the audacity of The alligator, as director Nanni Moretti baptized it, to change the cultural reality of the country through television. Berlusconi and his work are so alive on the screen that it is difficult to believe that no one is occupying that political space that he knew how to open on January 26, 1994, when he announced his leap into politics in a historic nine-minute speech in prime time.
In addition to the series, bookstores have covered their display cases these days with a quite illuminating title about the direction of the work: In the name of freedom. The strength of Silvio Berlusconi's ideas (Piemme, 2024). The book of Paolo Del Debbio, who obviously vindicates the political construction of the man who appears on the cover, contains an unpublished writing by Il Cavaliere and it has already become – in its first week on the street – a bestseller in bookstores and on Amazon, where it occupies absolute number one among its customers' preferences.
The book's prologue is written by his daughter Marina, who recounts the last words she exchanged with her father about to die. She, she writes, told him: “Like all men, you will leave. But the ideals for which you have fought will never disappear.” It is not clear if those ideals were ever collective and transcended his private interests, but it is evident that the political space he represented (Forza Italia) has been orphaned.
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Roberto D'Alimonte, political scientist and polling expert, believes that “there is demand” in that political space: “The problem is that there is no clear offer. It is a fragmented and not very credible offer. And in today's politics, the offer must be embodied in a leader with clear messages. And there is no leader here. [Matteo] Renzi failed, [Carlo] Calenda too. Antonio Tajani [vicepresidente del Gobierno] “He is trying, and he is doing better than it seemed… but we will see the European elections,” he points out.
Forza Italia, in the hands today of Tajani (also vice president of the European People's Party) is now a residual party in Italy (with around 8% voting intention). Polarization has spread. And the attempts to build a center, or rather center-right, space that would take over from Berlusconi's Forza Italia have been, so far, in vain. Renzi, whom Berlusconi always saw as a kind of bastard son who could take the reins of that universe, tried it with his Italia Viva party. Then Calenda also did it with Azione. And the two joined forces to create an artifact called The Third Pole. But they couldn't even agree among themselves.
The paradox of the situation is that this adrift space is now being assaulted even by the extreme right. “The own [primera ministra, Giorgia] Meloni, if we look at her from the perspective of international politics, has a moderate approach to the main issues,” insists D'Alimonte. “In part, she is also looking for that space. Today, center-right moderates vote for Meloni; If she didn't have that component, she wouldn't have 27% support. Italians did not wake up two years ago as new neo-fascists. Is [el líder de la Liga, Matteo] Salvini who targets that electorate. And I believe that the European elections will confirm Meloni's hegemony.” A policy, like almost all those that make up the Italian map today, the daughter of Berlusconi's own projects.
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