Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi: The Salesman Who Bought a Country

In November 2011, as the eurozone debt crisis threatened to take Italy down with it, Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister. Crowds gathered outside the government headquarters in Rome and sang the "Hallelujah Chorus." Two years earlier he had told an interviewer, without evident irony: "The majority of Italians in their hearts would like to be like me." Both things were true at once, and the tension between them is the entire subject of his life.

Vacuum Cleaners and Cruise Ships

He was born in Milan on 29 September 1936 to Luigi Berlusconi, a bank clerk, and Rosella, a secretary — a genuinely ordinary middle-class household, a fact he never let anyone forget. He read law at the University of Milan and graduated with honours in 1961; his thesis was on the newspaper advertising contract, which in retrospect reads like a statement of intent. To pay his way he sold vacuum cleaners, wrote classmates' homework, and sang on cruise ships, playing organ and double bass. The crooner never entirely left him; he sang at private functions into old age.

Building Milan, Then Owning It

He founded Cantieri Riuniti Milanesi in 1962 and Edilnord in 1963, and moved into property development at exactly the moment post-war Italy needed housing. Milano 2, a planned suburban complex north of the city, went up from 1969; Milano 3 followed in 1976.

The genius stroke came from an ancillary problem. To supply his developments he launched a cable company, Telemilano, in 1974. Italian law at the time prohibited private national television. Berlusconi got around it by building Canale 5 between 1977 and 1980 — distributing identical programming to independent local stations to be broadcast simultaneously, producing a national network that technically did not exist. He created the holding company Fininvest in 1978, bought Italia 1 in 1982 and Rete 4 in 1984, and controlled close to 45 per cent of the Italian television market.

He then collected the rest of Italian public life. AC Milan in 1986, which he turned into the most successful club in the country. Standa department stores in 1988. Arnoldo Mondadori, the publisher, in 1990, giving him a fifth of Italian publishing. By 2004 *Forbes* ranked him the thirtieth-richest person in the world at $10 billion.

Forza Italia

By 1993 antitrust pressure and the *Mani Pulite* corruption investigations were dismantling the entire Italian political class that had protected his interests. His response was to create a party. Forza Italia — "Go Italy," a football chant — was founded in 1993, campaigning on the promise that a successful businessman would clean up a corrupt and sluggish state. His coalition took 43 per cent in March 1994.

His first government lasted nine months. He nominally handed his corporate roles to associates, but his family retained 51 per cent of Fininvest, and the conflict of interest was never resolved in any of his three terms. His coalition partners walked out.

He lost in 1996, then returned in 2001 with the House of Freedoms coalition and did something no Italian politician had managed in fifty years: served a full five-year mandate. He cut taxes, passed school and labour reforms, increased support for the unemployed and disabled, loosened the rules on media ownership, and backed the United States over Iraq against roughly 75 per cent domestic opposition. Parliament granted him immunity from prosecution in 2003; the Constitutional Court struck it down in 2004.

His third term, from 2008, ended in November 2011 when the bond markets stopped believing he could keep Italy solvent.

The Trials

The legal record is long. Convictions for financial crimes in 1997 and 1998 were overturned on appeal. Bribery charges followed in 1999, and a trial for bribing judges. He was prosecuted over the Ruby case — paying an underage Moroccan dancer for sex and abusing his office to conceal it — convicted in Milan and eventually acquitted after both parties denied that relations occurred. "Bunga bunga" entered the international vocabulary.

Only one charge stuck. In 2013 Italy's highest court upheld his conviction for tax fraud over film rights dealings. He was expelled from the Senate in November 2013 and banned from public office. He was 77.

He came back anyway. In 2019, at eighty-two, he was elected to the European Parliament. In 2022 he returned to the Italian Senate, with Forza Italia a coalition partner in Giorgia Meloni's government.

His private life was conducted with the same disregard for boundaries. He married Carla Dall'Oglio, with whom he had two children, and then in 1990 the actress Veronica Lario, with whom he had three more. Lario's public denunciation of his conduct was among the more damaging blows he sustained, precisely because it came from inside. He was known throughout Italy as *il Cavaliere* — the Knight — a title he kept using long after the honour itself had become a joke, and he cultivated an image of lavish living and unembarrassed populist taste that his supporters read as authenticity and his opponents as vulgarity elevated to a governing philosophy. He made approving remarks about Mussolini and disparaging ones about Muslims, and survived both.

Why Silvio Is Called a Genius

If the word means intellectual depth, it does not apply, and no serious account claims it does. Berlusconi's gift was commercial and political cunning of an extraordinarily high order, and it should be described precisely rather than dressed up.

Three specific manoeuvres make the case. First, the synchronised-broadcast trick that built Canale 5: he identified that a law forbidding a national private network said nothing about many local stations airing the same tape at the same moment, and constructed a media empire in the gap. Second, the founding of Forza Italia in 1993 — recognising, faster than any professional politician, that the collapse of the old parties had left a vacuum that could be filled by a brand, a slogan and television access, and building a national party from nothing in months. Third, sheer durability: he became Italy's longest-serving post-war premier, and after a criminal conviction, expulsion from parliament and a ban from office, was back in elected politics within six years.

The counter-case is not merely a caveat; for many it is the verdict. He never resolved a conflict of interest that let a man owning some 90 per cent of Italian commercial television, alongside influence over the state broadcaster, govern the country. His governments were repeatedly accused of legislating to protect him personally, including an immunity law the Constitutional Court threw out. He was convicted of tax fraud, and the Ruby affair degraded Italian public life in ways his acquittal did not undo. Critics regarded him as a populist who weakened democratic institutions and pioneered the fusion of media ownership, celebrity and government that later spread far beyond Italy. Admirers saw a charismatic and capable statesman.

The honest formulation is that Berlusconi was a genius of positioning and salesmanship rather than of statecraft, and that the same faculty produced both the empire and the damage. He is contested territory, and any account claiming otherwise is selling something.

Legacy

He died on 12 June 2023 in Milan, aged eighty-six, of chronic leukaemia, and was given a state funeral at the Duomo. He leaves Mediaset, a football club he made great, a political party still in government, and a template — the businessman-outsider who converts media reach into power — that has since been copied on several continents. Italians argued about him for thirty years and have not stopped.

Achievements

• Member of the National Order of Merit — 2004
• Grand Cross of Royal Norwegian Order of Merit
• Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland — 2002
• Affiliated with AC Milan
• Educated at University of Milan
• Worked as politician, entrepreneur and media proprietor