Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media tycoon and four-time prime minister who brushed off a litany of legal battles and sex scandals to dominate Italian public life for more than two decades, has died in Milan aged 86.
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Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since World War II, Berlusconi was being treated in Milan’s San Raffaele hospital, the clinic where he had been receiveing care, after suffering a lung infection resulting from leukaemia. His death was announced on June 12 by Italian media
Long the country’s richest man, Berlusconi made his fortune in real estate before going on to build Italy’s biggest media empire, Mediaset, which he later enlisted to facilitate his swashbuckling entry into politics.
The scandal-plagued tycoon infamous for the debauchery of his “bunga bunga” parties transformed and monopolised Italian politics at the turn of the century, introducing a skewed left-right divide that pitted his conservative camp against the centre-left anti-Berlusconi front.
Known as “Il Cavaliere” (The Knight), among many other nicknames, he was admired and reviled in equal measure at home – but was mostly derided abroad. After a decade in power, The Economist magazine famously ran a cover story on his record in office with the headline, “The man who screwed an entire country”.
Despite the mockery, his unbounded bravado, unique brand of politics and tumultuous career became a playbook for ambitious politicians around the world, making him a precursor to contemporary populism.
Long before the likes of Donald Trump played the “anti-system” card, Berlusconi had successfully cast himself as the bête noire of a declining and discredited political class. Accused of being as narcissistic, sexist and self-serving as the billionaire former US president, Berlusconi also played an equally piteous victim, railing against the judiciary and once claiming he was “the most persecuted person in the history of the world and the history of man”.
He also played a more inveterate jester than Britain’s Boris Johnson, entertaining Italy as much as he ran it; a more polished macho than his friend Vladimir Putin, adding an affable, cultured touch to his personality cult; and a subtler strategist than Matteo Salvini, the loudmouthed nationalist who briefly supplanted him as leader of the country’s right-wing camp – only to be overtaken in turn by the far right’s Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s current prime minister and once a junior minister under Berlusconi.
The most talked about Italian politician since Benito Mussolini, Berlusconi was once described as a “disease that can only be cured through vaccination” by the country’s most respected postwar journalist, the late Indro Montanelli. The vaccine, Montanelli argued on the eve of the 2001 general election, involved “a healthy injection of Berlusconi in the prime minister’s seat, Berlusconi in the president’s seat, Berlusconi in the pope’s seat or wherever else he may want. Only after that will we be immune.”
Montanelli was wrong about immunity, and so were the many other pundits who wrote off the Cavaliere, time and time again, even as his political career – and popularity – powered on.
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