A giant poster at the Mediaset media conglomerate headquarters in Cologno Monzese, near Milan, after media mogul and former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi died on June 12.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
For sheer outrageous entertainment value, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi had no equal. His clownish, politically incorrect and scandalous sexual behaviour during the “bunga bunga” years endeared him to millions of Italians – mostly men – helping to propel him from one political victory to another and making him prime minister of a G7 economy four times.
In 2009, during a visit to the central Italian city of L’Aquila, which had just been hit by an earthquake, killing more than 300 residents and forcing 40,000 into tents, Mr. Berlusconi said of the survivors: “They should look at it as a weekend of camping.”
Not long ago, he was still pushing the dubious humour envelope when he told the players of A.C. Monza, his midranked Serie A soccer team, that he would deliver “a bus of whores into the locker room” if they beat a top rival. He was probably serious.
Mr. Berlusconi died Monday morning at 86 in the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, the city where he was born three years before the start of the Second World War. In recent months, he had been in dire health, with severe pneumonia caused by myelomonocytic leukemia, and was undergoing chemotherapy. Yet he remained in good spirits, telling his Forza Italia – Go Italy – party supporters by video that he was working from bed and eager to escape and get back on the job.
A state funeral will be held Wednesday at Milan’s main cathedral, the Duomo.
Despite his roguish life and the endless criminal cases against him, Mr. Berlusconi was lauded by friends and foes alike. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called him “one of the most influential men in Italian history,” which is no doubt true, given his long reign and ability to generate sensational headlines virtually every day. Russian President Vladimir Putin called him a “true friend” who made an “invaluable contribution to the mutually beneficial Russian-Italian partnership,” according to Italian news service ANSA. Marcello Viola, the chief prosecutor in Milan, issued condolences for “a person who marked Italy’s history.”
Mr. Berlusconi was certainly a consummate and steely politician who virtually invented the type of populism that inspired Donald Trump. The former U.S. president admired his Italian counterpart, though the feeling was not necessarily mutual. Mr. Berlusconi once said that what he liked most about Mr. Trump was his wife, Melania. “Trump liked being compared to Berlusconi,” Alan Friedman, the U.S. journalist who wrote a biography of Mr. Berlusconi and produced a documentary about him, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “The irony today is that, compared to Trump, Berlusconi looked like a gentleman.”
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Berlusconi was nothing if not a business and political survivor, having been accused of a bewildering array of crimes and sins, ranging from money laundering and tax fraud to engaging in sex with underage girls and associating with the Mafia. Reuters tallied no fewer than 35 criminal cases against him.
Using armies of high-paid lawyers and stalling tactics such as running out the statute of limitations – as well as portraying himself, as Mr. Trump does, as the victim of a witch hunt orchestrated by his enemies – Mr. Berlusconi beat all the charges except one, proving that a constant barrage of legal problems is not a political death sentence; instead, it can unite supporters, snuffing out mutinous behaviour. In 2006, he told the party faithful: “I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I am a patient victim, I put up with everyone, I sacrifice myself for everyone.”
Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaks at the opening of his People of Freedom bloc congress in Rome, Italy, March 27, 2009.Remo Casilli/Reuters
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The one charge that nailed him was tax fraud. In 2013, Italy’s top appeals court sentenced him to four years in prison. He received an exemption owing to his age – he was 76 at the time. Instead, he served his sentence by doing unpaid community service in a retirement home. He was also banned from public office for two years. But ever the politician, ever charming and ever electable – he was one of the world’s most famous political brands – he bounced back and won a seat in the European Parliament in 2019 and returned to the Italian Senate last year, nabbing a seat in the 2022 election that saw Forza Italia enter the coalition government led by Ms. Meloni.
Mr. Berlusconi’s rise was remarkable for a man who did not come from a powerful family – his father was a bank employee, his mother a housewife who raised three children when Italy was a war-torn wreck. He studied law at the University of Milan and earned money as a musician and singer, performing as a cruise-ship crooner in the 1960s. What propelled him to fame and fortune was his formidable entrepreneurial spirit, which gave him the ingredients for his populist success, ultimately making him the longest-serving postwar Italian prime minister.
He made an early fortune assembling residential real estate in Milan. In the 1970s, he focused on mass media, creating a cable-TV business that broke the near-monopoly held by Rai, the state broadcaster. That business became known as Mediaset, which controls Italy’s three most-watched private channels, featuring dumbed-down game shows brimming with scantily clad women and a variety of imported U.S. programs such as Dallas and Baywatch. The Berlusconi media portfolio included Mondari, Italy’s biggest publishing house, and various film companies.
Then came A.C. Milan, one of the winningest soccer teams in Italian and European history. Mr. Berlusconi bought the club in 1986 and returned it to international glory, which perhaps reached its peak in 1994, when Milan trashed Barcelona in the Champions League final. The team would win two more Champions Leagues, eight Serie A titles and a Coppa Italia before Mr. Berlusconi sold it in 2017 (the team is now owned by New York’s RedBird Capital Partners).
His business base, especially the media and soccer assets, served as his personal propaganda machines to promote his brand and hit back at his “enemies” – essentially anyone who disagreed with him. Some of his business marketing experts were converted into political marketing experts. A.C. Milan’s slogan – Forza Italia – became the name of his political party, one that still holds considerable, though diminishing, power in government.
His brand of right-wing, strongman illiberal democracy is emulated today by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Mr. Trump and others. He ridiculed institutions, especially the judiciary, which he argued was out to destroy him, promoted an anti-immigrant agenda and degraded women, treating them as little more than eye candy on his TV programs. He also invited extreme right-wing figures into his government, among them Gianfranco Fini, the former head of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), who became a deputy prime minister in Mr. Berlusconi’s government.
“Berlusconi was the original populist, long before Donald Trump,” said Mr. Friedman, the U.S. author. “He was able to charm the masses in Italy with his slogans and his empty promises about job creation, tax cuts and modernizing the Italian economy. In the end, he failed to implement any major economic reforms. But it worked for him. He was undeniably the dominant political figure in Italy from the early 1990s until just a few years ago.”