A businessman-turned-media star-turned-politician, he was elected to his nation’s highest political office while shattering numerous political and electoral norms. Initially not taken seriously by the elites, he won office in part by the force of his superior communication skills and media savvy, which included a genius for capturing the eyes and ears of average voters. Once in office, this flamboyant populist leader was beset by sex scandals and a series of endless investigations that led him to declare that “I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide.”
Although this description will sound familiar to American ears, the subject here is Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since Mussolini, a man who personified the idea of the larger-than-life political-cultural figure of his time. Silvio Berlusconi died last week at age 86.
Berlusconi was in many ways a perfect icon for Italy, an incarnation of all the positive and negative aspects of his country — generosity, creativity, fantasy, and the love of beauty (though, in his case, of things, not art) on the one hand; and vulgarity, ostentation, envy, and Machiavellianism on the other. Born to a family of modest means in a suburb of Milan, Berlusconi grew up with a passion for singing, a zesty sense of humor, and a knack for salesmanship. After studying law, he took out a loan from the bank his father clerked at to start a property development business. Once the business became successful, he pooled together his funds to set up a cable television station. By the mid-1980s, his little cable TV startup had grown into three of Italy’s then-four major national networks.
THE DEATH OF SILVIO BERLUSCONI SIGNALS A PASSING OF THE TORCH FROM FIRST-WAVE POPULISTS TO SECOND
Not content with his achievements in real estate and media, in 1986, Berlusconi purchased A.C. Milan, Italy’s most prestigious soccer team, and restored it to its former glory. The team won the Italian national championship in 1988 and the European championship in 1989 and 1990.
Berlusconi next set his sights on politics. In 1993, the affable man from Milan founded the center-right Forza Italia party. Only a year later, Berlusconi helped lead Forza Italia to power with the help of advertisements he aired on his own networks. Although his government’s coalition collapsed within a year, compelling Berlusconi to step down as prime minister, he remained a prominent member of the opposition through the rest of the decade. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” Berlusconi said to his supporters. “I am a patient victim. I put up with everyone. I sacrifice myself for everyone.”
Berlusconi forgot to mention that he also came back from the dead — politically speaking, that is. In 2001, Berlusconi returned Forza Italia to power and restored himself to the premiership, a post he held on a near-continual basis for the next five years. After his party’s defeat in 2006, the ineptness of the government that took over helped him return to power in 2008.
A 2013 trial that barred Berlusconi from holding a post in Italian politics for five years still did not end his political career; in 2019, he won a seat in the European Parliament and then one in the Italian Senate just last year.
One of the most colorful world leaders in recent history, Berlusconi leaves a complicated legacy for Italy, Europe, and the world. In Italy, where he was the most polarizing political personality of the past 40 years, some consider him a hero and a saint; others believe him to be the worst criminal in Italian history. Beyond the country’s politics, which he had a magnetic pull on for the better part of the past several decades, he also had a significant impact on the country’s culture. His importation of the lowest-common-denominator TV programming in the ’80s had the effect, as an Italian friend told me, of “helping to reduce Italians to a mass of ignoramuses interested only in gossip and physical appearance.” And for the world, Berlusconi proved that mixing media control with humor, charisma, sports triumphs, and the sweet smell of success can be a potent combination in electoral politics, and a mixture that opponents can only overcome if the billionaire entrepreneur himself becomes the cause of his own undoing, or if the legal apparatus of the state is marshaled relentlessly against him.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His next book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, will be published in July by the University of Alabama Press.
