Before Trump, there was Berlusconi

The story of Mr. Berlusconi: How Italy became a democratic leader and a forlorn corporate tainted the world

His party formed a government with the Prime Minister. The Italian government faced headaches from Berlusconi’s comments on the war in Ukraine.

However, Berlusconi’s days as a political figure were not over. He stayed on as leader of his Forza Italia party through his sentence, and ran for and was elected a member of the European Parliament in 2019. He then returned to Italian politics after being elected to a Senate seat in the 2022 Italian general elections.

Given his age at the time, 77, his four-year jail term was commuted to four hours a week assisting dementia patients. When Berlusconi left office, Italy’s economy was stagnant and debt was skyrocketing.

His political career appeared to come to an ignominious and definitive end in 2014, when he was ousted from parliament following a conviction for tax evasion.

Ultimately, when the European debt crisis hit Italy in 2011, it was turmoil in the financial markets that forced him to step down as prime minister for the last time.

Four times Italy’s prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi dominated Italian politics for three decades and fundamentally reshaped its landscape and imagination. The ebullient entrepreneur, who was raised in a middle-class family in Milan and once sang cheap love songs on cruise ships to make a buck, rose to prominence as the mastermind of Italy’s commercial television. He devoted himself to politics after the fall of the First Republic. The story of Mr. Berlusconi is an inextricably Italian one. It goes beyond the peninsula as well. In leveraging his fame and celebrity to gain power — and managing against all odds to retain it — Mr. Berlusconi provided a template for Mr. Trump’s own political career.

The media mogul served as Italy’s prime minister multiple times beginning in 1994, and his flamboyant lifestyle left a mark on popular culture, while his abrasiveness, coarseness, populist style, and constant legal woes trashed political norms and tainted Italy’s image in the world.

Silvio Berlusconi — The founder of a huge media empire — died in his sleep at age 86 on Monday, January 26

“A power that no political leader has ever been able to concentrate in his own hands in any democratic or liberal country in history,” Viroli says. “That’s why I use the word ‘tyranny.’ “

Berlusconi was able to keep both his TV networks as prime minister and take control of all state-run broadcasting, because there was no conflict-of-interest legislation in place.

It was known that Berlusconi had entered politics to protect his empire. Berlusconi was enmeshed in legal troubles through the 1990s, from providing false testimony to investigations into ties with the Sicilian Mafia.

In the 1994 general elections, Berlusconi swept to power. The government crumbled just seven months later, and he demonstrated to the world that humility wasn’t one of his virtues.

Italy’s largest media empire, Mediaset, grew in the 1980s. That gave Berlusconi the ability to start to own newspapers, and he owned the Il Giornale and the AC Milan soccer club.

If someone told me that this was the beginning of a huge media empire and a new political order where the owner of the media empire would become the prime minister, I would laugh at the whole thing.

A born showman, Berlusconi liked to brag that his career began as a crooner on cruise ships. He moved on to construction and real estate, and built an empire that included television networks, newspapers, publishing houses, a top soccer team and many more.

ROME — Former Italian prime minister, and sitting senator in the Italian parliament, Silvio Berlusconi died at the age of 86, according to reports from Italian media on Monday.

The Secret Life of Mr. Berlusconi: From Entertainment to Politics in the Borderland of Entertainment and Political Persecusion

ROME — The tycoon-turned-politician spent his career mixing entertainment and power, escaping sex scandals and remodeling his party in his own plasticized image. He claimed elections he lost were actually stolen from him. Law enforcement scrutinized his businesses, and he continuously praised his friend, Putin. Struggling to beat him politically, opponents relied on prosecutors to oust him through the courts. But he managed to turn even that to his favor, raising the specter of political persecution to re-energize his electorate and remain firmly at the center of his country’s politics for years.

The parallels between them are obvious. The two had grandiose egos, a penchant for kitsch furniture and lewd jokes, and were obsessed with TV. Perhaps most important, they both possessed an instinctive ability to tap into the passions of the populace. They met halfway, in the borderland of entertainment, and both came from real estate. They shared a penchant for politics of paranoia. Long before Mr. Trump cried “witch hunt” and labeled the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, a “psychopath,” Mr. Berlusconi was denouncing a Communist plot brought by judges in “red robes” who were out to destroy him.