Silvio Berlusconi, a Showman Who Upended Italian Politics and Culture, Dies at 86
Silvio Berlusconi was at the forefront of Italian public life, off and on, for a quarter-century, serving as prime minister four times.Credit...Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
By
Jason Horowitz and
Rachel Donadio
June 12, 2023
ROME — Silvio Berlusconi, the brash media mogul who revolutionized Italian television using privately owned channels to become the country’s most polarizing and prosecuted prime minister over multiple stints in office and an often scandalous quarter-century of political and cultural influence, died on Monday at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. He was 86.
His death was confirmed in a statement by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with whom he was a coalition partner in the current Italian government. No cause of death was given, but he was hospitalized last week as part of his treatment for chronic leukemia and other ailments.
To Italians, Mr. Berlusconi was constant entertainment — both comic and tragic, with more than a touch of off-color material — until they booed him off the stage. But he kept coming back. To economists, he was the man who helped drive the Italian economy into the ground. To political scientists, he represented a bold new experiment in television’s impact on voters. And to tabloid reporters, he was a delicious fount of scandal, gaffes, ribald insults and sexual escapades.
A gifted orator and showman who sang on cruise ships as a young man, Mr. Berlusconi was first elected prime minister in 1994, after the “Bribesville” scandals, which had dismantled Italy’s postwar power structure and removed his political patron,
former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, from office. Mr. Berlusconi famously announced that he would “enter the field” of politics to deliver business-minded reforms, a move that his supporters framed as a selfless sacrifice for the country but that his critics considered a cynical effort to protect his financial interests and secure immunity from prosecution related to his business affairs.
Mr. Berlusconi claimed victory for his center-right alliance in the 1994 elections and was soon named prime minister.Credit...Jacques Langevin, via Getty Images
That first go in office collapsed quickly, but voters, many persuaded by his televised signing of a “Contract With Italians,” overwhelmingly chose him, Italy’s richest man, to lead the country again in 2001, this time as the head of Italy’s largest parliamentary majority since World War II.
That center-right governing coalition lasted longer than any government had since the war. In 2005, he became prime minister again after a government reshuffle, then used his power to upend the electoral law to give himself a better shot at winning the next general election. He narrowly lost that bid, in 2006, but stayed at center stage and returned to power in snap elections in 2008.
His victory demoralized a generation of the left. Opponents were both obsessed with Mr. Berlusconi and utterly vexed by him, a politician who seemed to be made of electoral Teflon despite a raft of international faux pas, failures to deliver on pie-in-the-sky promises and the tanking of the Italian economy.
Liberal politicians, and the prosecutors he demonized as their judicial wing, watched in dismay as he used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment despite being convicted of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.
His governments spent an inordinate amount of time on laws that seemed tailor-made to protect him from decades of corruption trials, a goal that some of his closest advisers acknowledged was why he had entered politics in the first place.
One law overturned a court ruling that would have required Mr. Berlusconi to give up one of his TV networks; others downgraded the crime of false accounting and reduced the statute of limitations by half, effectively cutting short several trials involving his businesses. He enjoyed parliamentary immunity, but in 2003 his government went further, passing a law granting him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office — in effect suspending his corruption trials.
Some of those laws were eventually ruled unconstitutional, and in 2009 the country’s highest court
struck down the immunity law.
Mr. Berlusconi addressing a court in 2003 during a hearing on corruption charges linked to his media company.Credit...Giuseppe Cacace/Getty Images
The damage of those corruption charges was then compounded by accusations that he paid for sex with an underage
girl nicknamed Ruby Heart-Stealer. He was
later acquitted, but the story was catnip for the global tabloid press. So, too, were reports that he held “bunga bunga” sex parties with women allegedly procured by a news anchorman on one of his channels and a former dental hygienist and showgirl who became a Milan regional councilwoman. Mr. Berlusconi maintained that these were merely elegant dinners.
The scandals incited large-scale protests by women. Even the Roman Catholic Church, an influential force in Italian politics that had often held its nose when it came to Mr. Berlusconi, signaled that enough was enough.
But what really dislodged Mr. Berlusconi from power was not a sudden ethical awakening in Italy or a tide of intolerance toward his extracurricular habits, but the unspinnable fact of Europe’s debt crisis and the lack of confidence among European leaders and debtholders that he could lead the country out of it.
By the time he
finally resigned in 2011, amid a fractured conservative coalition and general national malaise, a good deal of damage seemed to have been done. Many analysts held him responsible for harming Italy’s reputation and financial health and considered his time in power a lost decade that the country had struggled to recover from.
Ultimately, Mr. Berlusconi was much more than his time in office, the policies he introduced or the allies he backed.
His often outrageous, norm-warping and personally sensational approach to public life, which became known as Berlusconism, made him the most influential Italian politician since Mussolini. He transformed the country and offered a different template for a leader, one that would have echoes in Donald J. Trump and beyond.
Man of Many Faces
Mr. Berlusconi used his media empire to manipulate — and for more than 20 years dominate — Italian politics, which had long been ideological and issue-driven. It was as if he had turned a black-and-white picture into Technicolor television filled with endless hours of reality show programming, of which he was the unquestionable maestro. The impact on the country’s culture is hard to overstate.
By turns clownish and devious, optimistic and cynical, down-to-earth populist and stratospheric elitist, he was the fault line along which Italy broke.
Mr. Berlusconi’s family-friendly campaigns often had the support of the church. His faith in the entrepreneurial spirit was unwavering. But with all that came an unapologetic hedonism that valued riches, beauty and the adoration of youthful vigor, as illustrated by the showgirl image of the women he promoted on his television channels and sometimes in government. What emerged was an updated playboy ideal that has left its mark on the imaginations, and aspirations, of countless Italians.
Mr. Berlusconi’s knack for synthesizing — critics would say dumbing down — politics to slick messaging and bullet points is now followed by even those who claim to reject everything he stood for. And his savior style (“Thank God we have Silvio,” a party anthem went) still has its disciples.
In Mr. Berlusconi’s world, whoever was offended by his flamboyance, or his sexist jokes, or his conflicts of interest, or his aversion to paying taxes — he once called refusing to pay high taxes “morally acceptable” — was lumped in with self-righteous left-wing bores or fun-and-freedom-hating Communists.
Mr. Berlusconi cultivated friendships with several leaders, especially those in countries with energy resources needed by Italy. He met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at Mr. Putin’s rural lodge in 2003.Credit...Pool photo by Viktor Korotayev
He had a genius for victimization, which he would fall back on in response to criticism of his policies or of his personal behavior or to investigations into accusations that swirled around him — of conflicts of interests, of corruption, of ties to the Mafia and powerful Masonic lodges. Judges were often “Communists” on a witch hunt, a talking point that resonated with Italians frustrated with a troubled and slow-moving justice system.
He even capitalized on his infection with the coronavirus in September 2020, calling in to a political meeting from the Milan hospital where he was being treated and claiming that doctors had told him that, out of all the thousands of tests conducted there since the start of the epidemic, “I have come out in the top five in terms of the strength of the virus.”
Mr. Berlusconi’s cult-of-personality politics, his freewheeling governance style and even his focus on hair care prompted comparisons to Mr. Trump. Both men played up their personal wealth as a qualification for government, and both relished dominating news cycles with often outlandish behavior.
But
in contrast to Mr. Trump, Mr. Berlusconi came from modest means, and the size of his fortune, in the billions, was never questioned.
His politics generally fit into a traditional center-right paradigm, and his advisers said privately that he detested the comparison to Mr. Trump. After the U.S. Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters in January 2021, Mr. Berlusconi wrote that the attack would “darken the historical memory of this presidency.”
But Mr. Berlusconi was not above associating with the far right for political gain. An opportunist, he aligned with a party with ties to Italy’s Fascist past, though he did not share their Italians-first nostalgia, and he deepened Italy’s relationship with Russia and Turkey. But he also avidly supported the United States and NATO, and believed in the neoliberal, pro-European and anti-communist conservatism of the postwar era.
Mr. Berlusconi could treat world leaders as if they were guests on his reality television program. He called President Barack Obama, who found him amusing, “young, handsome and sun-tanned.” Wearing a bandanna, he hung out in Sardinia with Tony Blair, a British former prime minister. He once kept Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany waiting on the tarmac. He wore matching furry hats with a frequent Russian drinking buddy, President Vladimir V. Putin, whom, years later, and to the embarrassment of his coalition partner and much of Italy,
he vocally supported in the war in Ukraine.
Prime Minister Berlusconi with President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan during the Group of 8 summit in Huntsville, Ontario, in 2010. Credit...Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency
Mr. Berlusconi’s brazen use of television and other media outlets he controlled, and his knack for dominating coverage in those he didn’t, helped secure his political standing. His party, Forza Italia, or Go Italy — named after a soccer cheer — was established as a self-funded advertising vehicle for his candidacy. He never really anointed a successor.
“If you look at him from a global perspective, he represents the first real postmodern politician,” said Alexander Stille, the author of “
The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi.” He added, in an interview: “It’s not an accident that he comes along after the end of the Cold War. He represents a kind of politics that, despite the ritual anti-communism of his political message, is a content-less politics. It’s a personality-driven politics in which he proposes himself, rather than a particular political program, as the answer to the country’s problems.”
Image Was All
Nicknamed Il Cavaliere, or The Knight, a name usually applied in Italy to business or community leaders, Mr. Berlusconi cultivated his image. Photo shoots of him and his family in the magazines owned by his Mondadori publishing empire depicted him as a family man, though a stylish one. About 5-foot-5, with a wide smile and boundless energy, he dressed in bespoke double-breasted suits. In later years he had hair implants and plastic surgery that gave his face a wax-figure look, and despite the season, he often sported a tangerine sheen.
Mr. Berlusconi, newly elected, and his wife at the time, Veronica Lario, with President Bill Clinton in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome in 1994.Credit...Reuters
That glow had faded considerably by 2013, when he was
stripped of his Senate seat after being convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and losing his parliamentary immunity. His four-year prison sentence was reduced to 10 months of community service, which he performed in a home for seniors near Milan.
The tax fraud conviction led to his being barred from holding public office until May 2018. While he appealed the ban, he still acted as a kingmaker in Italian politics. But his campaign in 2018 for his party in national elections, at age 81, showed the limitations of the power of his personality.
He recast himself as Italy’s
reassuring grandfather figure in an uncertain time, and failed spectacularly. He and his party, which built Italy’s center-right coalition when he entered politics in 1994, had become increasingly irrelevant. In 2018, the conservative leadership moved to Matteo Salvini, the hard-right leader of the nationalist League party (formerly the Northern League party). By 2020, the once marginal post-Fascist party Brothers of Italy had outperformed Mr. Berlusconi’s once powerful Forza Italia. Yet he took credit for bringing them into the political mainstream. When it came to Mr. Salvini’s League party and the “Fascists,”
Mr. Berlusconi said in 2019 at a political rally, “We let them in in ’94 and we legitimized them.” He insisted, though, that “we are the brain, the heart, the backbone.”
That was less and less the case. He lamented Italy’s shift to a euroskeptic populism, and he vented much of his waning rage on the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, but his critics contended that Mr. Berlusconi’s brand of populist buffoonery, and his flagrant abuses of office and patina of corruption, created in great part the anti-elite forces that he so loathed and which ultimately eclipsed him.
In 2021, he was a weakened force who threw his support behind the establishment government of Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank appointed to lead Italy as a technocrat. But Mr. Berlusconi still dreamed big. In 2022, his
ambitions to become the country’s head of state, a seven-year position usually filled by a figure of unimpeachable integrity and sobriety whose influence flows from moral authority, drew mockery. To campaign, the billionaire who hoped to wash away decades of stains and rewrite his legacy, made hours of phone calls to disaffected lawmakers in search of votes.
“‘We are forming the Bunga Bunga party and we want you with us,’” Cristian Romaniello, a lawmaker formerly with the Five Star Movement recounted Mr. Berlusconi as saying. Mr. Berlusconi then added, “‘But I’ll bring the ladies.’”
And for all of his talk of responsibility, Mr. Berlusconi helped pull the rug out from Mr. Draghi when he sensed an opportunity in 2022 to return to power and helped set off early elections. He re-entered government, at 85, as a junior coalition partner to Ms. Meloni, once a junior minister in Mr. Berlusconi’s government, who led the Brothers of Italy and
became prime minister and the dominant power in Italian politics. In the most right-wing government since Mussolini, Mr. Berlusconi argued that he would keep a toe in the center.
Mr. Berlusconi with Matteo Salvini, left, and Giorgia Meloni, center, at a rally in Rome last September.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times
But he mostly embarrassed Ms. Meloni by defending Mr. Putin and getting caught, perhaps on purpose, writing mean things about Ms. Meloni on his desk in the Senate, from which he had once been exiled for a fraud conviction.
It was a dramatic fall for a proud man who once called himself the Jesus Christ of politics, saying, “I am a patient victim, I bear everything, I sacrifice myself for everyone.”
Critics note that with Mr. Berlusconi, Italy sacrificed plenty, too.
In the years Mr. Berlusconi dominated Italian politics, the country’s debt rose, then fell, then rose again; household income did not keep pace with most of Italy’s European peers; educated young people continued to emigrate because of a lack of opportunities, creating a brain drain; and the country’s rankings on indexes of transparency and competitiveness dropped.
Critics said that his freewheeling style of governing weakened Italian institutions, including the judiciary, which he attacked constantly. And clouds continued to trail him. In cables published in 2010 by WikiLeaks, U.S. diplomats
raised questions about the ties between Mr. Berlusconi’s personal investments and the country’s foreign and economic policies. Those doubts always lingered. Even members of the Meloni government, to which he belonged, suspected his relationship with Mr. Putin as having financial underpinnings.
Roots in Real Estate
Silvio Berlusconi was born on Sept. 29, 1936, in Milan in the middle-class neighborhood of Isola Garibaldi. He was the eldest of three children of Luigi and Rosella (Bossi) Berlusconi. His father was a bank clerk; his mother a homemaker. During World War II, when Silvio was 7, his father fled to Switzerland for two years to avoid conscription in the army of Mussolini’s rump Salò Republic.
Silvio attended a prestigious boarding school in Milan, Sant’Ambrogio, run by Salesian priests, getting good grades in every subject except religion. He studied law at Milan’s State University and graduated with high marks in 1961. While there, he met Marcello Dell’Utri, a student from Palermo in Sicily, who would become one of his closest business associates and a co-founder of Forza Italia.
One of Mr. Berlusconi’s early endeavors was crooning on cruise ships.Credit...Marka/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
It was Mr. Dell’Utri who in 1974 hired Vittorio Mangano of Palermo to work as a stable hand and driver at Mr. Berlusconi’s villa. Mr. Mangano was later convicted of drug trafficking and murder. In 2014, as the Berlusconi era was in its twilight, Mr. Dell’Utri was convicted of having ties to the Mafia and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Milan in the 1960s was the epicenter of the “Italian miracle,” the economic boom that powered the country nearly to full employment. Its population was growing, and so was a need for housing. The young Mr. Berlusconi, intent on becoming an entrepreneur, was full of ambition and ideas but lacked capital. In one of his first real estate ventures, in 1961, he persuaded the owner of the small bank where his father worked, Banca Rasini, to be a guarantor. That led to a residential development and other lucrative projects.
Mr. Berlusconi’s largest undertaking was Milano 2, an enormous suburban gated community built in the 1970s. Home to some 14,000 residents, it encompassed six schools, a church, cinema, shops, green space and an artificial lake. The origins of the initial investment remain murky, but a television station set up exclusively for the complex would form the foundation of his media empire.
A Move Into Television
In a country with three state-run national television networks — RAI 1, 2 and 3 — Mr. Berlusconi saw potential in creating private national networks. Over time he built up three — Italia 1, Rete 4 and Canale 5 — and became their leading shareholder. That would have been considered a monopoly elsewhere, but Italian regulations did not yet consider it such.
Compared with the stodgy RAI, with channels run by the governing Christian Democrats, Socialists or opposition Communists, Mr. Berlusconi’s television offered glamour and sex. There were scantily clad women, game shows and American nighttime soap operas like “Dallas” and “Dynasty”— fare that lightened the mood in Italy after the “
years of lead” in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when left-wing and right-wing groups carried out terrorist attacks.
“His commercial television in the 1980s had an immense impact on the country — he changed it and modernized it,” said Giovanni Orsina, a professor of contemporary history at Luiss University in Rome and the author of several books on Mr. Berlusconi. “His enterprise helped build the idea of individual freedom that Italians have had ever since, for better or for worse.”
He was helped by Mr. Craxi, the head of the Socialist Party and a two-time prime minister, whose ties with Socialist parties across Europe helped Mr. Berlusconi expand his television holdings in France and Spain in an era of privatizations.
Mr. Berlusconi owned A.C. Milan, one of Italy’s most popular and successful soccer teams. Players carried him on their shoulders at the team’s San Siro stadium after winning the 1988 Italian championship.Credit...Ferdinando Meazza/Associated Press
In 1986, by then a real estate, television and advertising mogul, Mr. Berlusconi bought his beloved hometown soccer team, A.C. Milan, through his Fininvest holding company and invested millions on a new coach and expensive foreign players. His own popularity rose when the team went on to win the national championship in 1988 and the European Cup in 1989 and 1990.
But his television empire was soon at risk.
In 1992, magistrates in Milan made the first arrests in a sweeping corruption investigation focusing on bribes paid to politicians by business leaders in exchange for contracts. A third of Parliament came under indictment, as did many business leaders and thousands of government officials. The scandal, called Tangentopoli, or Bribesville, in the press, marked the end of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, which had governed Italy in the postwar period. To avoid prosecution, Mr. Craxi fled to his villa in Tunisia, where he died in 2000.
With the demise of the Socialists, Mr. Berlusconi lost his political patron at a time when new regulations were most likely to force him to sell off some of his television channels. The center-left looked poised to win the next elections.
After consulting with his advisers, he took matters into his own hands, founding Forza Italia in December 1993 and introducing the most sophisticated use of political branding ever seen in Italy.
Forza Italia candidates for Parliament were told not to have bad breath or sweaty palms. “I’m like Prince Charming,” Mr. Berlusconi once said. “They were pumpkins, and I turned them into parliamentarians.” Forza Italia politicians were known as the Azzurri, or Blues, like the members of Italy’s national soccer team, who wear blue jerseys.
Mr. Berlusconi in 1985. “His commercial television in the 1980s had an immense impact on the country — he changed it and modernized it,” an author of books about him said.Credit...Michel Clement/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In January 1994, he used a new medium to announce his run for office: a
video message that he aired on his three national television networks. “Italy is the country I love,” he began, dressed in a somber suit and sitting at a desk in his 18th-century villa, with family photos on a bookshelf in the background. “Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here, I learned from my father my job as a businessman.”
His salesmanship and promises of economic prosperity were convincing. After a two-month campaign, Forza Italia won the election, easily dominating in Sicily and parts of southern Italy that had been Christian Democratic strongholds.
In a country with some of the lowest employment levels for women in Europe, polls found that 41 percent of female homemakers who watched more than three hours of television a day supported him, compared with 30 percent who backed the center-left opposition. Women over 50 were to be one of his most loyal electorates.
‘Not Fit to Lead’
With Forza Italia leading a center-right alliance, Mr. Berlusconi became prime minister. But the government lasted only seven months before a coalition partner, the anti-immigrant Northern League, withdrew support. Still, Forza Italia was now a player. Mr. Berlusconi thrived as a vocal opposition figure in the late 1990s, when a series of center-left governments helped Italy meet the qualifications for the introduction of the euro currency there.
Those center-left governments, however, failed to pass conflict-of-interest legislation that might have thwarted the overlap between Mr. Berlusconi’s business empire and his work as a lawmaker. His political survival had always benefited from an opposition divided between former Communists and former Christian Democrats. Now the Italian judiciary became Mr. Berlusconi’s de facto opposition.
In a 1996 profile in the The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Stille wrote of Mr. Berlusconi: “Imagine if a real-estate mogul along the lines of Donald Trump also owned CBS, NBC, the Fox network, Paramount Pictures, Newsweek, Random House, Condé Nast, The Los Angeles Times, HBO, the Dallas Cowboys, Walmart stores, Aetna insurance, Loews Theaters and Fidelity Investments and had the political clout of Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, and you get an idea of the long shadow Mr. Berlusconi casts in Italian life.”
Mr. Berlusconi on Italian national television in 2001. He shaped TV into a major political force in Italy.Credit...Associated Press
Ahead of national elections in 2001, The Economist magazine put Mr. Berlusconi on its cover with the headline “
Fit to run Italy?” The accompanying article said, “In any self-respecting democracy it would be unthinkable that the man assumed to be on the verge of being elected prime minister would recently have come under investigation for, among other things, money-laundering, complicity in murder, connections with the Mafia, tax evasion and the bribing of politicians, judges and the tax police. Mr. Berlusconi is not fit to lead the government of any country, least of all one of the world’s richest democracies.”
He won the election anyway. For his campaign, Forza Italia sent a 127-page glossy magazine to doorsteps across Italy. Called “An Italian Story,” it offered a fairy-tale version of Mr. Berlusconi’s life, striking notes that resonated with aspirational Italians: His wealth, his respect for his father and love for his mother, his insistence on punctuality, even his eating habits. “His diet is based on carbohydrates at midday and protein in the evening,” the magazine said. “He can’t resist apple pie, a specialty of his mother, Rosella, and he hates garlic and onion.”
It explained the end of his first marriage, to Carla Dall’Oglio: “The family was tranquil and untroubled, but something in his relationship with Carla started to change, and by the beginning of the ’80s their love had changed into a close friendship.”
In 1980, at age 44 and still married to Ms. Dall’Oglio, Mr. Berlusconi met Veronica Lario, an actress who was starring in the play “The Magnificent Cuckold,” a 1920 farce by the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck. When their first daughter was born in 1984, Mr. Berlusconi recognized the child and separated from his wife. He married Ms. Lario in 1990. The couple divorced in 2014.
In 2022, at age 85, he had a “symbolic,” wedding with his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, then 32, in which she wore a white wedding dress and they cut an enormous wedding cake. Already a member of Parliament, she returned to represent a Sicilian town she had never campaigned in, became a gatekeeper and power broker and, for his 86th birthday, arranged for a
hot-air balloon to release thousands of red balloon hearts over his villa’s garden.
Mr. Berlusconi is survived by a daughter, Maria Elvira, known as Marina, who is chairwoman of Fininvest, the family’s holding company, and a son, Pier Silvio, who is deputy chairman and chief executive officer of the Berlusconi-controlled broadcast company, Mediaset, both from his first marriage; three children, Barbara, Eleonora and Luigi, from his second marriage; a brother, Paolo; 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
A Talent for Endurance
Mr. Berlusconi managed to stay in power for so long through a combination of factors, among them a lack of viable alternatives to him, in the view of a cynical electorate; his gift for salesmanship; and Italy’s penchant for “trasformismo” — changing political stripes with the times. And loved or loathed, he was the country’s most recognizable political figure.
“On the one hand he expresses a natural paternal authority, behaving as a truly Mediterranean patron, offering protection and rewards in return for loyalty and obedience,” the political scientist Paul Ginsborg wrote in “Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony” (2004). “On the other,” he added, “his is a constant assertion of a certain type of virility. Berlusconi presents himself as a ladies’ man, not as a man’s man, as Mussolini did, and his entourage plays willingly to this image.”
Mr. Berlusconi’s legislative record was fairly thin. His governments cut Italy’s steep taxes on wealth and property, although some of those cuts were reversed by the unpopular technocratic government of Mario Monti, which succeeded him in 2011. Mr. Berlusconi’s glib winking about tax evasion resonated with the self-employed, who make up a large percentage of Italian workers.
After a referendum in the 1980s that closed Italy’s nuclear reactors, the country became entirely dependent on foreign energy imports, a reality that continues to dominate its foreign policy. Mr. Berlusconi personalized that, too, cultivating friendships not only with Mr. Putin, but also with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.
Mr. Berlusconi with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya in 2009. Mr. Berlusconi signed a treaty with the North African country promising $5 billion in exchange for energy contracts and a crackdown on migration.Credit...Shawn Baldwin for the New York Times
Under Mr. Berlusconi, Italy in 2008 signed a “friendship treaty” with Libya promising $5 billion over 20 years to compensate for Italy’s colonial occupation of Libya in the early 20th century. In exchange, Libya agreed to give Italy lucrative energy contracts and to prevent unauthorized immigrants from traveling through Libya to Italy. That arrangement unraveled after the American and European military intervention in Libya in March 2011, in which Mr. Berlusconi was a reluctant participant.
Just two years after hosting Colonel Qaddafi in Rome, Mr. Berlusconi succumbed to pressure from his Western allies and agreed to make Italy’s NATO bases available for the invasion, a move that would have consequences on immigration and affect Italy’s domestic politics for years.
Mr. Berlusconi was always a loyal ally of the United States, even if that meant swimming against prevailing currents. He bucked popular opinion in joining the so-called coalition of the willing in the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. At that time, his wife, Ms. Lario, wrote a book with the journalist Maria Latella, “Two Mothers Speak Out Against the Iraq War.”
The Emperor in Decline
The book was to be a precursor of things to come. In April 2009, Ms. Lario published an open letter in La Repubblica, a center-left daily,
rebuking her husband for his dalliances with young women and saying that she was filing for divorce. “Someone has written that this is just a diversion for an emperor,” Ms. Lario wrote. “I agree,” she added. “What emerges from the newspapers is shamelessly trashy, all in the name of power.”
Soon after, La Repubblica
published allegations that Mr. Berlusconi had entertained a prostitute at his private Rome residence. In one leaked wiretapped phone conversation, he can be heard telling the woman, Patrizia D’Addario, to wait for him “in Putin’s bed.”
This ushered in a sordid chapter of
sex scandals at a time when Italians were growing increasingly concerned by the yawning divide between the country’s serious economic crisis after the global financial collapse of 2008 and the prime minister’s priorities.
In diplomatic cables released in 2010 by WikiLeaks, the United States ambassador to Italy at the time reported that Mr. Berlusconi, worn out from a long night, had fallen asleep during their first meeting.
Mr. Berlusconi in the Senate in 2013, the year he was stripped of his seat.Credit...Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press
Mr. Berlusconi that year had renamed his party from Forza Italia to the People of Liberties. He returned to a new Forza Italia in 2013, when a coalition partner withdrew. Ever the optimist, he was still selling a vision.
But by the end, he was less attuned to the national mood. In February 2013, he took part in elections to replace a 15-month-old technocratic government. His campaign speeches harked back to his first rise to power, in 1994.
But with the economy suffering after the 2008 financial crisis, Italians had grown weary of empty rhetoric, such as his 20-year-old promises to build a bridge between Sicily and the Italian mainland.
In his campaign, Mr. Berlusconi struck populist notes that were critical of the austerity policies endorsed by Germany, the de facto leader of Europe, and he insisted that he had been ousted in an anti-democratic coup.
The center-left won, but without a clear majority in an election that saw the rise of the Five Star Movement, founded in 2009 by a former comedian,
Beppe Grillo, which captured the nation’s budding
anti-establishment, anti-euro mood.
In 2016, when Mr. Berlusconi underwent surgery to replace his aortic valve, Italian television broadcast live reports from the hospital. His health woes stayed in the news, even as his influence faded and he was humiliated by an enormous erosion of support in the 2018 election, which brought to power the populists he reviled.
He built an elaborate tomb for his family and friends at his villa in Arcore, outside Milan. He had a lifetime of epitaphs to choose from, uttering one candidate on one of his TV channels in 2009.
“The majority of Italians in their hearts,” he said, “would like to be like me.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
He introduced sex and glamour to Italian TV and then brought the same formula to politics, dominating the country and its culture for more than 20 years.
www.nytimes.com
