Mr. Berlusconi, a center-right chief, had served as prime minister 4 occasions since 1994. He was additionally one of many world’s richest males, having constructed a multibillion-dollar enterprise empire. Through his holding firm, Mr. Berlusconi managed tv channels and newspapers, life insurance coverage and film manufacturing firms, actual property and the world-class soccer group A.C. Milan.
“The best in the world” is how the billionaire prime minister described himself in a single typical flourish of bravado. “All the other world leaders wish they could be as good as I am.” Everything was hyperbolic. When he was identified with covid-19 in 2020, he known as supporters from the hospital and claimed that medical doctors had advised him his case was “in the top five in terms of the strength of the virus.”
For greater than three a long time, the diminutive colossus bestrode the slim Italian peninsula, monopolizing the media, manipulating the levers of energy, and capturing the creativeness of buddies and foes alike.
Il Cavaliere, or the Knight, as he was known as, did this virtually solely on his personal phrases. He rode his tv airwaves into the middle of the vituperative political enviornment and used all of the weapons at his disposal to stun the opposition, lasso a coalition out of warring allies and, above all, struggle for his personal survival.
Mr. Berlusconi’s preoccupation with self-preservation — towards enemies actual, imagined and manufactured — typically took precedence over the common enterprise of the state.
Under Mr. Berlusconi’s distracted watch, Italy slipped into social malaise and financial catastrophe. Ultimately, the free markets that the Milan businessman championed so zealously confirmed no confidence in his potential to information the nation out of a 2011 debt disaster, resulting in his ouster.
The defeat, and a subsequent conviction for tax fraud, lowered the person who had promised to rescue Rome to a perma-tanned caricature recognized internationally for pursuing his personal pursuits, friendships with overseas dictators, and relationships with a lot youthful girls, a few of them allegedly for rent.
But inside Italy, Mr. Berlusconi remained key, reinventing himself as a soothing grandfather determine, kingmaker and voice of motive because the nation lurched even additional proper beneath populist leaders.
“To the mass of the people, Berlusconi appeared capable of delivering change. He appeared new,” mentioned Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at the Rome-based college Luiss. “Some will remember him as a man who could have done more to modernize the country. For others, he will be the great corruptor of Italian society, and it will take a generation to recover from the malaise that he has instilled.”
For his complete time within the public eye, Mr. Berlusconi — 5-foot-5, pudgy in construct, artistic in hairline and tangerine in complexion — towered over all different debate matters. Even after he left workplace, he had a tough time staying away.
Mr. Berlusconi gained election thrice as prime minister, together with a five-year stretch in a nation accustomed to instability.
His boosters credit score him with overhauling a politically ossified system and galvanizing a complete class of entrepreneurs. For them, he injected life into the dreary state-run tv group, modernized markets, gained soccer trophies with A.C. Milan and constructed a powerhouse center-right occasion from scratch.
Mr. Berlusconi revolutionized campaigning in Italy by updating cult-of-personality propaganda to the mass media age. He marketed himself as an irrepressible individualist and earthy everyman unfairly victimized by communist judges, ivory tower lecturers and bureaucratic killjoys. He talked about reducing taxes and slashing spending, the kinds of issues the government-addicted gerontocracy hardly ever broached. His airbrushed visage watched over Italy from the tv channels, journal covers, newspaper pages and freeway billboards he owned.
That vibrant model of Mr. Berlusconi eclipsed the darker aspect proffered by his perennially annoyed critics at house and overseas. It additionally obscured a life exceptional with out Photoshop — rife with political intrigue, cutthroat enterprise offers, courtroom drama, crass jokes and intercourse scandals. Mr. Berlusconi was Europe’s most colourful chief at the flip of the 21st century.
Empire-building a path to energy
Silvio Berlusconi was born Sept. 29, 1936, in Milan to a banker and a housewife. He earned further money at school writing papers for different college students. He helped pay for his regulation diploma at the University of Milan in 1961 by promoting vacuum cleaners and singing in a band that performed cruise ships and resorts.
By 27, he had shaped an actual property firm that finally earned him the nickname “King of Bricks,” after which constructed Milano 2, a sprawling suburb that supplied the monetary base for his ambitions.
Mr. Berlusconi devoured up native TV channels. To circumvent an Italian regulation at the time that allowed solely state-owned channels to broadcast reside nationwide, he dispatched couriers on bikes to ship prerecorded videocassettes to native stations. The similar program then performed on all his channels at barely totally different occasions, making a de facto community.
Mr. Berlusconi had assist in excessive locations. Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, a average chief of the Socialist Party, rose to the highest of Italian authorities in 1983 simply as Mr. Berlusconi reached the head of Italian media. The two males rapidly realized they may assist one another consolidate energy.
With Craxi in energy, Mr. Berlusconi added two extra nationwide channels in 1983 and 1984. He spent billions of {dollars} to amass the correct to air U.S. sitcoms and flicks. Millions of viewers tuned in to observe reruns of American soaps reminiscent of “Dallas” or to see “Colpo Grosso,” an Italian striptease program masquerading as a sport present.
Mr. Berlusconi — who embraced advertising mottos like “Always carry the sun in your pocket!” — diversified. Under the umbrella firm Fininvest, he added an promoting wing, a sequence of malls, a movie manufacturing firm, radio, newspapers and magazines, and, in 1986, A.C. Milan. The group grew to become a powerhouse and helpful political metaphor.
And in change for Craxi’s political safety, Mr. Berlusconi’s critics charged, he furnished his patron with constructive protection and many cash. Italian prosecutors alleged that Craxi, who resigned in 1987, obtained hundreds of thousands of mysterious {dollars} from Mr. Berlusconi’s Fininvest that went into non-public Swiss financial institution accounts.
The two males have been shut. Craxi served as finest man at Mr. Berlusconi’s 1990 marriage to his second spouse, Veronica Lario, whom he had met a decade earlier when she carried out topless in a play at a Milan theater he owned. (He had met her whereas married to his first spouse, Carla Dall’Oglio, with whom he had two youngsters.) Mr. Berlusconi had three extra youngsters. The couple divorced in 2014.
Survivors embrace his youngsters; a brother; 15 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
His try in 1990 to take over a publishing conglomerate hit a authorized bump that may lead to a long time of investigations of bribery towards Mr. Berlusconi.
The political order inside which Mr. Berlusconi prospered collapsed in 1992 when prosecutors launched the “Clean Hands” investigation that exposed a tradition of widespread corruption generally known as “Bribesville.” The scandal laid waste to the ethically versatile Christian Democrat political institution, but additionally destroyed Mr. Berlusconi’s political patron, Craxi, who fled to Tunisia in 1994 to keep away from jail on corruption prices.
That similar 12 months, together with his buddies out of energy and his left-leaning enemies keen to interrupt up his debt-addled enterprise empire, Mr. Berlusconi took motion.
On Jan. 26, 1994, his tv information applications broadcast Mr. Berlusconi’s dramatic announcement that he would, in soccer parlance, “take the field” to guard the nation from anti-free-market leftists who “do not believe in the individual.”
He shaped the political occasion Forza Italia, named after the nationwide soccer chant (“Go Italy”), and populated it together with his personal promoting executives. He promised tax cuts and better privatization of the general public sector to advertise effectivity.
Three months after taking the sphere, Mr. Berlusconi was elected prime minister.
Throughout a lot of Mr. Berlusconi’s preliminary stint in workplace, opposition leaders demanded in useless for him to dump his companies to keep away from a battle of curiosity. They criticized his decree prohibiting the arrest of individuals for political corruption and fraud, which freed hundreds of defendants within the Bribesville scandals — together with, doubtlessly, his brother.
After seven months, Mr. Berlusconi’s governing coalition got here crashing down. Mr. Berlusconi’s detractors breathed a sigh of aid, dismissing him as a fleeting footnote in Italian politics. But in political exile, he cemented his id because the chief of a brand new center-right area. The left-leaning authorities did not go significant conflict-of-interest legal guidelines and fell sufferer to infighting. In 2001, Mr. Berlusconi had one other shot at energy, and he took it.
Accusations and escalating scandals
That June, Mr. Berlusconi swept again into workplace with a stronger coalition and widespread reputation. And he was now not a novice. He expertly navigated internecine squabbles between his allies and dominated for 5 uninterrupted years.
During that point, he declared himself his personal overseas minister with allegiance to the United States, but additionally befriending strongmen reminiscent of Vladimir Putin of Russia, with whom he wore furry hats at a Black Sea dacha. In half to stop migrant waves from northern Africa, he constructed a relationship with Libyan chief Moammar Gaddafi, whom he gleefully let play ringmaster in a Rome ceremony full with Bedouins on thoroughbreds.
It was additionally a interval during which Mr. Berlusconi’s mood, bawdy humorousness and free tongue conspired to nominate him king of the gaffe. He in contrast a German lawmaker to a Nazi concentration-camp guard; mentioned Italian fascist chief Benito Mussolini by no means “killed anyone”; and introduced to the New York Stock Exchange that “another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries.”
More substantively, Mr. Berlusconi’s rising legion of critics charged that the prime minister was misusing his official energy for authorized safety, spending time and power pushing tailored legal guidelines by way of Parliament to defend himself from prosecution and shield his enterprise empire.
“If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest,” he mentioned in a 2001 speech to industrialists in Rome.
Italian magistrates accused Mr. Berlusconi of all the things from tax evasion to bribery to consorting with the Mafia. Throughout his years out and in of energy, dozens of trials towards Mr. Berlusconi ended both in acquittals or expired beneath statutes of limitations.
Mr. Berlusconi’s biggest influence on his nation’s prison justice system could have been his unrelenting characterization of its magistrates as a politically motivated cabal of communists — “red robes,” as he known as them. That demonizing, from the mouth of the nation’s chief, and amplified by all his media shops, eroded religion in a key, if malfunctioning, democratic establishment.
In 2006, Mr. Berlusconi misplaced reelection. His reputation was broken by his unwavering help for the United States and its struggle in Iraq, to which he contributed Italian troops. Left-leaning opposition members thought that they had rid themselves of their scourge as soon as and for all. And when he collapsed on stage throughout a 2006 political rally and underwent coronary heart surgical procedure, they began speaking about him up to now tense. Again, prematurely.
The leftist opposition to Mr. Berlusconi, vehement because it was, did not renew itself, provide an actual political different, or entice voters within the extra autonomous northern areas.
In April 2008, Mr. Berlusconi returned and consolidated energy. Again he handed legal guidelines to guard himself from prosecution, however with such a stable majority in each homes of Parliament that outrage appeared futile.
It was then, when Mr. Berlusconi appeared most untouchable, that his personal appetites aided his self-destruction.
In April 2009, Veronica Berlusconi known as “shameless trash” her husband’s plan to present seats in Parliament to aspirant showgirls. Five days later, she introduced she was leaving the person who “consorts with minors,” in obvious reference to Mr. Berlusconi’s attendance a month earlier at the 18th birthday of an underwear mannequin in Naples who known as him “Papi.”
The summer season ended with an unstable man hitting Mr. Berlusconi within the face with a statuette of the Milan Cathedral, breaking his tooth and nostril. The assault put Mr. Berlusconi again in his most well-liked political posture of sufferer. His ballot numbers climbed, and Mr. Berlusconi returned to appointing long-legged, full-lipped former nude fashions to metropolis councils, Parliament and his cupboard.
And then in 2010, at 74, Mr. Berlusconi was accused of paying for intercourse with an underage Moroccan girl, Karima El Mahroug, generally known as Ruby the Heart Stealer. More girls got here ahead, revealing particulars of bacchanalian “bunga bunga” events, a phrase that captured the world’s creativeness.
The investigations turned up hours of embarrassing cellphone transcripts. They depicted Mr. Berlusconi as an unhinged chief describing his sexual prowess, and cautioning towards an excessive amount of nocturnal exercise due to a morning assembly with the pope. (Mr. Berlusconi was discovered not responsible within the “bunga bunga” trials, together with a February 2023 acquittal on allegations of witness tampering.)
Even within the face of renewed public outrage and mutinies inside his coalition, Mr. Berlusconi held on, surviving 53 confidence votes in his final time period alone. But ultimately, the weakened businessman who got here to energy claiming financial experience was undone by his nation’s financial system.
Economic disaster, eventual downfall
A debt disaster brought on the downfall that his opponents couldn’t. International monetary markets with low confidence in Italy’s capability for progress despatched borrowing charges on the nation’s expansive debt hovering.
To appease traders doubtful of his management, Mr. Berlusconi stepped down. As he tendered his official resignation, a choir spontaneously gathered exterior the presidential palace and sang the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
More indignities adopted. A conviction for tax fraud in 2012 led to the stripping of his Senate seat and lack of parliamentary immunity. He obtained a jail sentence that was lowered to months of group service in a nursing house.
Mr. Berlusconi was down however not out. He waited out a ban on holding workplace till 2018 and ran once more, at age 81. By then, he had misplaced his edge and grow to be eclipsed by the populist leaders his model of politics had helped create. But his refusal to hitch populist governments, or to prop them up as they fell, helped cement his legacy as a centrist and usher within the administration of Mario Draghi, a pro-European technocrat.
The 2022 election of Draghi’s successor, Giorgia Meloni, saved Mr. Berlusconi within the political combine together with his occasion becoming a member of Meloni’s right-leaning coalition. The alliance obtained off to a rocky begin when a be aware, apparently written by Mr. Berlusconi, described Meloni as “bossy” and “arrogant.” Meloni then rebuked Mr. Berlusconi after his feedback about having pleasant ties with Putin.
Weeks later, they made a public present of unity. Mr. Berlusconi handled the second as if he was bestowing his blessing on her management. “Today with full merit,” he mentioned, “it’s up to Giorgia to lead the coalition, and she is doing so with authority and credibility.”
Stefano Pitrelli contributed to this report
