Flamboyant, freewheeling, slippery and preening, Silvio Berlusconi loomed over Italian politics for decades as billionaire businessman, media tycoon and prime minister.
Berlusconi, who died on Monday at 86, revelled in the spotlight, flattering or not, and often shined it on himself.
Cruise ship singer to TV tycoon
Berlusconi, born in Milan to a bank clerk and a homemaker in 1936, studied law as a young man but soon gravitated toward more performative ventures. He sang on cruise liners and in nightclubs, and convinced the owner of the small bank where his father worked to back him in a real estate project.
A residential development and other lucrative businesses led to ownership of a television station that, by the 1980s, formed the basis of a media empire. His television stations modernised the industry in Italy, and built him a fortune.
In the early 1990s, though, as his political allies lost power and the authorities cracked down on corruption, regulation seemed likely to break up his business empire. So Berlusconi founded a political party, Forza Italia — or Go Italy, after a soccer cheer — backed by the media-honed thinking of Berlusconi, who told his candidates for parliament not to have bad breath or sweaty palms.
“I’m like Prince Charming,” he once said. “They were pumpkins, and I turned them into parliamentarians.”
Finding a path as a political boss
Berlusconi put himself front and centre of his new party, announcing a run for office in 1994 with a video message that he aired on his three national television networks.
“Italy is the country I love,” he began, sitting at a desk in his 18th-century villa. “Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here, I learned from my father my job as a businessman.”
He promised prosperity and change with the vim of a lifelong salesperson — saying Italians could be rich like him — and after a two-month campaign his party won strong support. But he lasted only seven months as prime minister before his coalition government fell apart, a twist that Berlusconi, then 57, turned into an opportunity. Through the rest of the 1990s, he became a vocal opposition figure.
Before national elections in 2001, his party sent a 127-page glossy magazine to doorsteps around Italy, portraying a fairy-tale version of Berlusconi’s life: “He can’t resist apple pie, a specialty of his mother, Rosella, and he hates garlic and onion.”
Despite controversy over his business holdings, accusations of corrupt activities and links to organised crime, he won the election.
The world meets Silvio
In bespoke double-breasted suits, with an all-seasons tan, beaming widely at most any crowd, Berlusconi quickly became famous by alternately charming and offending wide varieties of audiences.
In Sardinia with Tony Blair, then the prime minister of Britain, Berlusconi wore an all-white ensemble complete with bandanna, prompting speculation that he was disguising a hair treatment. He grew close to President Vladimir Putin, trading bottles of liquor and supporting him through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine years after their first meeting. He called President Barack Obama “young, handsome and sun-tanned”.
In 2003, he offended many in Italy when an Italian newspaper quoted him saying that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini “never killed anyone”. The quote continued: “Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.”
Two years later, he convinced the Finnish president to give up her bid to make Finland the home of the European Union food safety office, which ended up in Parma, Italy. He said, “I had to use all my playboy tactics, even if they have not been used for some time.”
He also repeatedly disparaged Finnish foods, saying “Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is,” and “I’ve been to Finland and I had to endure the Finnish diet, so I am in a position to make a comparison.”
He often played the victim, once speaking of himself in biblical terms. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” he said in 2006. “I am a patient victim, I bear everything, I sacrifice myself for everyone.”
A sex scandal and public exhaustion
But Berlusconi’s bombastic personality, the accusations of corruption and his chaotic tenure grated on a public tired of debt and inequality. And he continued to outrage.
Visiting earthquake survivors in the Abruzzo region in 2009, he said, “They should look at it as a weekend of camping.” The next year, the Vatican’s official newspaper condemned him for telling a “deplorable” joke about Jews and the Holocaust.
That same year, he told people at a motorcycle show that it is “better to be fond of beautiful girls than gay”.
By then Berlusconi was facing accusations, published in the newspaper La Repubblica, that he had entertained a prostitute at his private Rome residence. That began a series of sex scandals, including allegations that he paid for sex with an underage girl nicknamed Ruby Heart-Stealer.
Berlusconi denied wrongdoing, and dismissed the allegations, saying in 2009, “The majority of Italians in their hearts would like to be like me.”
He was later acquitted, but the case became inseparable from Berlusconi’s public image, including the phrase “bunga bunga parties”, which is what Ruby called the events.
Resignation, a conviction and a return
Dogged by corruption accusations, a fracturing coalition and the global financial crisis, Berlusconi resigned in 2011. The next year, he was convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to 10 months of community service, which he performed in a home for seniors near Milan. Lawmakers stripped him of his Senate seat over that conviction, and he was also barred from holding public office until 2018.
When he finally got that opportunity again, at 81, he ran — and found that his centre-right party was a weakened force next to figures farther to the right. When it came to “Fascists”, Berlusconi said in 2019, “we legitimised them” in the 1990s. He insisted, though, that “we are the brain, the heart, the backbone”.
Still, a few years later, he found a way to pull the rug from under his rivals and set off early elections. In 2022, he reentered government, at 85, as a junior coalition partner to the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
Even in his final years, with his political clout diminished, his proclamations made headlines.
After contracting the coronavirus in 2020, he called into a political meeting from a hospital and claimed that doctors told him, 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alan Yuhas
Photographs by: Gianni Cipriano, Getty Images
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
