The Italian who gave the world a manual for Trump

Silvio Berlusconi, who was Prime Minister of Italy four times, had been struggling with his health for several years. In September 2020, he was hospitalized for ten days with Covid-19. On his release from the hospital, he spoke of “the most dangerous challenge” of his life. He had also undergone heart surgery a few years earlier, was cured of prostate cancer and had had a pacemaker for years. And in April 2023, he was diagnosed with a form of leukemia.

But Berlusconi seemed like a cat with nine lives, especially on a political level. Time and a lot of legal proceedings seemed to have little effect on the political fighting spirit of the Milanese with the eternal, bleached Colgate smile. Four times, the first time in 1994 and most recently in 2008, he would lead a centre-right government coalition. But even after he was no longer prime minister, his influence on Italian politics and society remained very great.

After a conviction for tax fraud, he was banned from holding public office for years. When a judge lifted that ban in 2018, Berlusconi was ready for another campaign. A year later he took part in the European elections and was elected to the European Parliament at the age of 82.

Until the end of his life, and despite all the scandals, sex parties, lawsuits and the stench of the mafia in his immediate entourage, Berlusconi remained a sought-after political voice on radio and TV in Italy. After the September 2022 election campaign, he co-brought the radical right-wing Giorgia Meloni to power, and his party Forza Italia entered the most right-wing government since the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini (1922-1943).

Sex on TV and in politics

Berlusconi was larger than life. Colorful and flamboyant, always with a dirty joke in your pocket. “Imagine how many women there are who would like to sleep with me, but don’t know it themselves. Life is one communication problem,” he once boasted.

Sex sells, Berlusconi understood that very well. By introducing commercial television in Italy, the media mogul Berlusconi brought sex to TV in the 1980s. The born entertainer knew all too well how to snatch viewers away from the boring state television Rai: half-naked young ladies with a glittery bikini and a radiant smile fared a lot better than middle-aged women in television-watching Italy.

Bread and games made him hugely popular with a large group of Italians – who watch TV for an average of three to four hours a day. Soap operas and light entertainment on Berlusconi’s commercial channels distracted attention from heavy but ‘boring’ problems such as a faltering economy or yet another accusation against the prime minister for fraud or a conflict of interest.

Outside of Italy he was for many years considered a clown, mainly because of his appearances on the European political scene. That turned out to be an underestimation of his dangerously great power. For almost twenty years, Berlusconi, alternately as Prime Minister and opposition leader, would determine Italian politics and leave a significant mark on society.

‘Communist’ crusades

Circumstances forced him to resign in 2011. Italy was groaning under a severe financial crisis, and Berlusconi was embroiled in it bunga bungasex scandal. Engrained in memory is the press conference of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, who were asked if they had discussed reforms with Berlusconi. The German and French leaders exchanged a look of understanding and started to laugh. But not Merkel and Sarkozy killed Berlusconi, the international markets did. Confidence in Italy reached freezing point, and Berlusconi’s time as prime minister was over.

In his farewell, he left Italy an even more deeply divided country. The xenophobic and then separatist Lega Nord was already on board in the first Berlusconi government, and would remain an important ally for years to come. During Berlusconi’s rule, illegal immigration and crime were often linked. With Berlusconi as prime minister, Italy intercepted boat people and returned them to Libya, a country with a pitch-black human rights record even then. In 2012, Italy was convicted of this by the European Court of Human Rights.

In Italy itself, Berlusconi got away with a lot, because he spoke ‘the language of the people’. It became his house style, years before other populist politicians, such as Matteo Salvini, would copy that style. Millions of Italians – young and old, male and female – fell in love with Berlusconi and parroted him. The sex parties? Actually, these were “galante dinners” with some music, good food and good wine. Anyone who couldn’t laugh at his raunchy jokes had no sense of humour. And his years of legal troubles were reduced to “crusades by communist judges,” magnified by an accomplice “leftist” press.

When Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994, he was already nationally known in Italy as president of the popular football club AC Milan and as a media mogul. Berlusconi, who had made money in real estate in Milan, used his TV fame to score in national politics. In his election campaign, he promised voters that he would make short work of the ‘grabbing’ political elite. He didn’t have to get into politics to enrich himself, because he was already rich. That message worked like a spell for his constituents.

To dream of l’America

Does all that sound like it’s about someone else? In 2016, Berlusconi gave everyone outside Italy the manual for understanding Donald Trump’s victory. Berlusconi was Trump before Donald Trump. And he had been more than twenty years earlier. America and Italy have something in common. Italians never stopped dreaming of l’America. Berlusconi’s political style was American. And during his active years in politics, he did his utmost to transform Italy’s multi-party system into a two-party system with two poles, a center-right and a center-left bloc – on the American model.

Conversely, Italy also attracts many Americans. The American journalist Alexander Stille wrote with The taking of Rome already in 2006 an authoritative biography about the danger of Berlusconi for Italian democracy. “Berlusconi’s story is one of the greatest political adventures of the late twentieth century, a stunning example of what happens when media, money and politics join forces in a society that has virtually no rules,” Stille wrote.

Berlusconi understood very early in his career that whoever controls television becomes immensely powerful. Today, the Berlusconi family still has significant control over Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial television network, the newspaper and Berlusconi mouthpiece Il Giornale, and at Mondadori, the largest publishing house. And when he was prime minister, Berlusconi also influenced public broadcaster Rai.

Not so clean hands

When Berlusconi entered politics, Italy was still experiencing the aftershocks of the dramatic year 1992. After the bloody Mafia attacks against Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two leading Sicilian investigating judges, Italians feared that their country had descended into a crime state. That same year, the Mani Pulite judicial investigation, Operation Clean Hands, had exposed the corrupt links between political parties and the corporate world. Voters were fed up with the traditional parties, and the Christian Democratic Democrazia Cristiana even disappeared from the scene altogether. In one fell swoop, the Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra also lost its political support.

Read also: Berlusconi has made the radical right mainstream in Italy

Berlusconi was ready to fill the power vacuum. He appealed to that last ounce of patriotism that the Italians still had: football. In 1993, Berlusconi’s good friend and business partner, the Sicilian Marcello Dell’Utri, co-founded the Forza Italia party with him, after the football slogan ‘Hup, Italy!’, with which the national team is fired up. That turned out to be a masterstroke: a few months later, in 1994, Berlusconi won the elections. Dell’Utri has a strong criminal smell. But despite his conviction for links to the Sicilian mafia, Dell’Utri would always remain Berlusconi’s ally and confidant.

Lies

The Mafia even got into Berlusconi’s house. Notorious is the episode involving Vittorio Mangano, a well-known Sicilian mafioso, who hired Dell’Utri in 1974 to protect Berlusconi’s children, who were threatened with kidnapping by another clan.

Berlusconi had been known for some time with shady circles of power in Italy. Propaganda Due, or ‘P2’ for short, was a secret box with ministers, MPs, bankers, secret service leaders and entrepreneurs in its ranks. P2 came to light in 1981 and was suspected of a conspiracy against the state. Berlusconi was a member, in order to make contact with the most powerful people in the country. But when the discovery of P2 caused a landslide in Italy, Berlusconi claimed his membership card may have been sent to him “without his knowledge”.

The claim that he had risen to the top of business and politics “under his own steam” was also a lie. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Berlusconi relied heavily on his friendship with Bettino Craxi, the up-and-coming leader of the Italian Socialist Party, who would later become prime minister. During that start-up phase of his media empire, Berlusconi borrowed huge amounts of money from banks controlled by the Socialist Party. Berlusconi’s right-wing political leanings did not prevent a close friendship with the socialist Craxi. In addition to a friendship, they also shared a lot of legal problems.

Laws written to his body

Berlusconi told his constituents that as a political leader he wanted to “save the country”. But once in power, his self-interest came first. Custom-written laws became notorious, which seemed to suit Berlusconi and his personal or business interests in particular. Some accounting crimes suddenly turned out to be no longer punishable, others were given a much shorter statute of limitations.

The nadir of this parliamentary tailor-made approach revolved around the Moroccan prostitute and showgirl Karima el Mahroug, alias ‘Ruby de Hartendief’. When Ruby, who had been a regular guest at Berlusconi’s sex parties, was arrested for theft, the then prime minister sold the lie to the police that she was the niece of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to keep her out of jail. Her arrest could provoke a diplomatic row with Egypt, according to Berlusconi.

In the judicial investigation into the Ruby case, the charge of abuse of power because of that incident at the police station outweighed the charge that Berlusconi had paid sex with the Moroccan when the girl was still a minor. Berlusconi’s MPs were called in to rescue him. The House would pass and pass a motion that Berlusconi really thought Ruby was Mubarak’s niece, and had acted as Prime Minister by putting pressure on the police. His final acquittal in the Ruby case exceeded Berlusconi’s wildest dreams.

Like Donald Trump, Berlusconi has worked hard on the contours of democracy, put his own interests before the country’s, and looked up to autocrats like Vladimir Putin, whom Berlusconi still considered a friend during the Ukraine war. But there are important differences. Italy is less important internationally than the US. And despite his numerous flaws, Berlusconi never incited his followers to storm parliament.