Three times chairman of the council (from May to December 1994, from 2001 to 2006, finally from 2008 to 2011), parliamentarian from 1994 to 2013, then from the fall of 2022 to his death, leader of the Italian right, of which he managed to unite the components, for two decades, media entrepreneur, ex-owner of the AC Milan football club, Silvio Berlusconi died, Monday, June 12, at the age of 86.
In addition to having repeatedly held the title of richest man in Italy, he is the prime minister who has spent the longest time in power since the birth of the Italian Republic: 3,340 days exactly. But, despite his longevity, his undeniable tactical sense, his talents as a communicator, his action in government remains marked by a series of private and financial scandals and by a relative impotence – the fruit of his casual and pleasure-loving temperament, his conflicts of interest and agreements made with political forces with sometimes conflicting ideologies, while his demonstrative friendship with Vladimir Putin, never denied despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cast a shadow over his image as an Atlanticist and moderate conservative. It will be interesting to know what history will remember, when the foam of Italian news that he saturated in all its sections (finance, business, scandals, sport and politics) has settled.
Born on September 29, 1936, Silvio Berlusconi is the eldest of a middle-class Lombard family. His father, Luigi, is an employee of the Rasini bank, of which he will become one of the leaders; his mother, Rosa Bossi, is a housewife. From their union will be born two other children: Maria Antonietta and Paolo. At 12, Silvio entered the Sant’Ambrogio College in Milan, run by Salesians.
According to the legend and the story of his childhood friends, he displays strong skills in Greek and Latin and already shows good dispositions for business. Wanting to help his classmates, he offers to do their homework for them in exchange for a few liras. But he makes a point of returning their donations if the mark they obtain is not up to their expectations. Silvio Berlusconi also prided himself on having undertaken two years of study at the Sorbonne, after his maturita (baccalaureate), an experience from which he will retain the rudiments of French and a great knowledge of the repertoire of Charles Trenet and Charles Aznavour.
Real estate investments
A law graduate from the University of Milan in 1961, with a dissertation on advertising contracts, he indulged his passion for song at the same time by joining a group, Les Quatre Docteurs, of which Fedele Confalonieri was also a member. This one, all his life during, will put himself at the service of the entrepreneurial strategies of Silvio Berlusconi, by ensuring the management when the latter is in power. The two men also lead cruises in the Mediterranean. All the adventures of this biography will be amply staged and illustrated by period photos, when he will publish Una storia italiana (“an Italian story”, untranslated), a magnified account of his existence, with which he will flood mailboxes. letters from Italians during the 2001 election campaign. But we are not there yet…
In the 1960s, Milan symbolized the Italian economic boom. It is estimated that 600,000 “immigrants” from the South or Veneto came to settle in the capital of Lombardy. We have to give them a roof. The city bristles with cranes, cement mixers are running at full speed, new neighborhoods are springing up.
Silvio Berlusconi quickly guesses the advantage (and the profits) that he can draw from this effervescence. He carried out his first real estate transaction by building a group of low-cost houses. The land alone costs 180 million lire, Berlusconi has only 10 million. Who funds it? This question will constantly accompany the consolidation and diversification of his empire. In this specific case, it is likely that the Rasini bank, of which Luigi Berlusconi became director in 1957, stood surety.
Other theses maintain that the Mafia, which also followed the movement of migration from south to north, deliberately bet on its success. Others, finally, evoke the troubled role of Michele Sindona, occult banker of the Vatican and Cosa Nostra, as if the life of Silvio Berlusconi should reflect all the unresolved enigmas of contemporary Italy.
Bagou and seduction
This first experiment would be followed by the construction of a set of one thousand apartments, then, in the early 1970s, by that of the Milano 2 district, the first Italian new town. Its future inhabitants will find everything they want there: a spacious and bright apartment, a garage for their car, a supermarket, schools, a hospital, sports fields. Always a forerunner, Silvio Berlusconi launched off-plan sales, a paper dream that, thanks to his glibness and his good manners, he was keen to make a reality in the eyes of his future buyers. His seduction strategy is summed up by himself thus: “I am convex with concave people and vice versa. »
To carry out this project, Silvio Berlusconi founded the company Edilnord with partners (bankers, businessmen, lawyers) whose pedigree is, if not shady, at least mysterious. This first company, whose name can be found in the various lawsuits that will punctuate the career of Silvio Berlusconi, will be followed by many others, until the birth of Fininvest in 1974, the holding company controlling all its activities. In addition to the name of Fedele Confalonieri in the command structure of these companies, we also find that of another childhood friend: Marcello Dell’Utri, who will be imprisoned from 2014 to 2018 for “complicity in mafia association”. It was also in the 1960s that he met Carla Elvira Lucia Dall’Oglio, whom he married in 1965 and divorced in 1985. Two children sealed this marriage: Marina, born in 1966, and, three years later , Pier Silvio.
His success was crowned by the title of “knight of work” – which earned him his nickname “il Cavaliere” – awarded by the President of the Republic, Giovanni Leone, in 1977. But Silvio Berlusconi was already abandoning concrete to take an interest in to another activity: the press, by becoming, in 1979, the majority shareholder of the daily Il Giornale, and television, of which the State abandoned the monopoly in 1976.
Network of influence in all walks of life
Hundreds of small chains are emerging. The “king of concrete”, which controls Telemilano, proposes to unite them under a single banner, Canale 5. Thanks to a law on media concentration made to measure, other channels, Rete 4 and Italia 1, will complete this offer, which quickly becomes equal, in terms of audience, with RAI’s public channels. The empire went international, with the launch of La Cinq in France in 1986, then Tele 5 in Germany and Spain.
At the same time, he bought the Mondadori publishing house in 1990, under the nose and beard of Carlo De Benedetti and with the complicity of a corrupt magistrate. The group is also diversifying into banking, insurance, financial products and distribution. The icing on the cake: in 1986, he bought the Associazione Calcio Milan, AC Milan, a football club with which he won eight Italian championships and five European trophies.
Such a rise would of course be impossible without significant political support. Silvio Berlusconi can count on the friendship, and the complicity, of Bettino Craxi, a strong man from Milan and future president of the socialist council, with whom he became friends from the mid-1970s. It would also be impossible without a solid network of influence in all walks of life. The Italy of that time, plagued by the political violence of the years of lead and threatened by the rise of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), was a geopolitical battleground between West and East.
If he is hardly worried by the investigations of the operation “Mani pulite” (“clean hands”) on the vast network of corruption which will bring about the disappearance of the Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party, Silvio Berlusconi adheres to the influential Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), founded by Licio Gelli, declared nostalgic of Mussolini. This secret association makes a point of saving Italy from communism, even if it means creating chaos conducive to the establishment of a strong power. Silvio Berlusconi rubs shoulders with former ministers, businessmen, rogue secret service officers.
Comfortable parliamentary immunity
“Italy is the country I love. It was with these words that Silvio Berlusconi appeared on all his television channels on January 26, 1994, to announce his intention to embark on the campaign for the 1994 legislative elections. “I refuse to live in a dictatorship ruled by immature forces and by men tied to a politically and economically bankrupt past. »
Two opposing theses: his own, in which he claims his disinterestedness and his sole desire to serve the country and save it from communism. That of his opponents, who maintain that this famous discesa in campo (“descent into the field”) was dictated by the fear of seeing the magistrates put their noses in his empire, then heavily indebted. What better than parliamentary immunity to take shelter? How better to protect yourself from investigations than by dictating the laws? Of Silvio Berlusconi’s entire political career, the birth of Forza Italia (“go Italy”), the party that will allow him to emerge victorious in the election and to accede for the first time to the presidency of the council, is the most innovative event. A textbook case for political science lessons.
Silvio Berlusconi – who remarried Veronica Lario, a former theater actress with whom he will have three other children – sees politics as a business. It was therefore within one of his companies, Publitalia, that the idea of forming a new party took shape. The moment is propitious: the political class has come out of the “Tangentopoli” affair (vast network of financing and corruption), the Italians are ready to let themselves be conquered by the novelty. His success as an entrepreneur and the successes of AC Milan are the guarantees of his efficiency, the power of his media empire allows him to control communication, finally, his fortune allows him to make the most sumptuous campaign.
The first executives of Forza Italia are all, with a few exceptions, executives of Fininvest, lawyers of Cavaliere, employees of its television channels, men all the more loyal as they are salaried. Added to this entrepreneurial conception of politics is a winning strategy dictated by the majority voting system. Without paying attention to their differences, however fundamental, he allies himself with the Northern League, which claims the autonomy of northern Italy, and the Italian Social Movement (MSI, post-fascist), which, on the contrary, advocates a State strong and centralized and favored by southern voters.
The promise of a “liberal revolution”
On May 10, 1994, Silvio Berlusconi was appointed chairman of the council on a promise to lead a “liberal revolution”. The experience is short-lived. In December, the Northern League withdrew its confidence in him. Silvio Berlusconi is then suspected of links with the Mafia, which would have supported with benevolence both his success as an entrepreneur and a politician. Didn’t he host in his villa of Arcore the mobster Vittorio Mangano in a fictitious function of groom? At the cost of what secret deal? Berlusconi will maintain that the presence of this man precisely allowed him to protect himself from the threats of Cosa Nostra against himself and his family. Despite his denials, he was indicted and the President of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, appointed the Minister of Economy Lamberto Dini in his place.
Returning to the opposition, he does not admit defeat. While the left settled in Palazzo Chigi and quickly fell into unpopularity, he again presented himself at the head of the same right-wing coalition called “La Casa delle Liberta” (“the house of freedoms”), in the 2001 elections, which he won. He will be one of the few Italian heads of government to be able to carry out his mandate until its end, in 2006. However, he is beaten once again by Romano Prodi, the same year. Divided, the center left failed to stay in power for more than two years.
A new ballot provoked the return of Silvio Berlusconi to business in 2008. The team that supported him (Forza Italia, Northern League and National Alliance) was identical, even if it took the name, this time, of Il Popolo della liberta (“the people of freedom”), the outline of a single right-wing party that paralleled the creation, a few months earlier, of the Democratic Party (center left). The slogans are also the same: fight against the communists (even if the PCI was scuttled in 1991), against the “red” magistrates who are relentless against it, liberalization of the company and lower taxes.
Lucrative personal business
If the effects of his policy on Italy, becalmed in sluggish growth and then in recession, are doubtful, the same is not true of his personal affairs. Denying the idea that there could be a conflict of interest between his activity as an entrepreneur and his function as chairman of the board, he will always make sure to exercise the second for the benefit of the first. Never had his societies been better off than when he was in power. Under his authority, the government decriminalizes the “false balance sheet”, shortens the limitation periods for certain financial and corruption offenses of which it is accused, the television channels of the Mediaset group record advertising revenue records, while it develops not the management of RAI. At the same time, inheritance tax is reduced, to the point of almost completely disappearing.
The opposition has calculated that he had enacted 21 so-called “ad personam” laws that will allow him to emerge without damage, apart from having to maintain an army of lawyers at exorbitant prices, from the thirty or so trials that have been brought before him. brought. This form of privatization of power is illustrated by the choice of his Roman residence, at the piano nobile of the Grazioli Palace (1,000 square meters rented in the center of Rome), where private life and public activities mingle, to the detriment of the apartment of function of the head of government at the Chigi Palace, where he will spend only one night.
How would you describe Silvio Berlusconi’s last term? Baroque? Truncated? How to explain that the Italians entrusted him, once again, with the reins of the country, when he had had time to prove his incompetence and his lack of interest in public affairs? By a form of latent anarchism that would make them prefer a caricature of power to the theoretical majesty of its exercise? When, in the spring of 2009, the Noemi Letizia scandal broke out, named after a young girl from Naples, still a minor, courted by Silvio Berlusconi, the benevolence of many Transalpines towards the escapades of their president of the council turns into a sense of shame, even disgust.
Pimping network
This news is immediately followed by a vitriolic statement, published by the daily La Repubblica, from Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, who not only announces that she is seeking a divorce, but asks her husband’s friends to protect him. against his inextinguishable sexual appetites despite his fragile health (prostate cancer in 1997, installation of a pacemaker in 2006). Wasted effort. A few months later, Patrizia D’Addario, a woman from Puglia, enters the scene and reveals that fine parties are regularly organized at the Grazioli Palace or in the Villa d’Arcore, in the suburbs of Milan.
As Italy sinks into the longest recession in its history, Silvio Berlusconi plunges headlong into lust. Soon a system emerges devoted entirely to the satisfaction of the satrap. The “Ruby” case, named after a young girl whom Silvio Berlusconi tried to present as the niece of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, reveals a pimping network under the tutelage of a former regional councilor, a a former star newscaster and the chairman’s personal accountant. Dozens of girls are fed, housed and paid to serve the Cavaliere’s wishes and keep quiet.
The echo of these cases is considerable, not only in Italy. The country and its leader are losing whatever credit they have left on the international scene. Silvio Berlusconi, who had, if not been a visionary, always known how to capture the mood of the Italians, maintains that his country is doing well and “that the restaurants and the planes are full”, while the debt flies away. Secretly, the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, is preparing the sequel. On November 12, 2011, following a banal vote in the House where the government was outvoted, the chairman of the council tendered his resignation. He is replaced by Mario Monti.
General interest work
Then begins a long decline. Although he still maintains that he is a “victim”, no one seems to believe it, except his relatives. Prosecuted for “prostitution of a minor”, he was first heavily sentenced and then released on appeal. But it was another case, this time of tax evasion, which put him out of the game. In 2012, he was sentenced to four years in prison (a sentence finally reduced to one year), a two-year ban on public service and six years of ineligibility.
Because of his age, most of this sentence will be commuted to community service, which he performs in a hospice for the elderly, in the suburbs of Milan. However, the Senate, where he was elected in 2013, pronounces the forfeiture of all his mandates until 2019. Silvio Berlusconi, once again, cries conspiracy. From now on, he devotes most of his energy to avoiding the emergence of a real political successor. From 2014 begins the time of splits. Influential figures such as parliamentarians Raffaele Fitto, Angelino Alfano and Denis Verdini left Forza Italia to found small centrist parties, each time weakening his influence in parliament, while considerably reducing the talent pool at his disposal.
It will be necessary to wait until 2019 so that, drawing the consequences of his physical weakening which obliges him to limit his public appearances, he ends up appointing one of his last weighty faithful, the former President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani, as operational manager of Forza Italy. The latter will endeavor to take as few initiatives as possible, without missing an opportunity to remind them of their unconditional loyalty.
At the polls, the gradual decline of Forza Italia is getting worse. During the general elections of March 4, 2018, for which Silvio Berlusconi had tried to return to the fore, in the shoes of the savior of the right, his party obtained only 14% of the votes and was overtaken by more than 3 points by the League of Matteo Salvini (far right), who took advantage of the vacuum created by the weakening of his opponent to “occupy the ground” and lead a very effective campaign based on the rejection of Europe and migrants. A year later, during the European elections, Forza Italia will drop below 9%. In a political landscape marked by the radicalization of the right and the emergence, alongside Matteo Salvini, of a new post-fascist formation, Fratelli d’Italia, which will obtain 26% of the vote in the legislative elections of autumn 2022, the right Berlusconian has become an auxiliary force, peaking at 8% of the vote and strong of 45 deputies and 18 senators.
On the business side, the last years of his life seem marked by the obsession to consolidate his heritage by maintaining the union between his five children, despite the notorious disagreement between the two eldest, Marina and Pier Silvio, from his union with Carla Dall. ‘Oglio and long involved in the management of the group, and the three children conceived with Veronica Lario, born twenty years later, in the 1980s.
In the spring of 2017, Silvio Berlusconi separated, in favor of mysterious Chinese investors, from his club, AC Milan, which over time had lost much of its luster and had become a major source of losses. In the spring of 2016, he began discussions with the French businessman Vincent Bolloré, owner of Vivendi, to forge an alliance that would consolidate his media empire, but relations between the two men deteriorated, while the Frenchman increased his participation. in the Mediaset group up to nearly 30%, causing the outbreak of a legal dispute between the two businessmen. Vincent Bolloré will take a challenge to Brussels against the tailor-made laws which protected his rival from any risk of losing control of his group.
Reinvigorated for a time by this fight in which he will once again put his political influence at the service of his private affairs, the former chairman of the board manages less and less to make people forget his inevitable weakening.
Separated in 2020 from his partner Francesca Pasquale, Silvio Berlusconi offers himself the luxury of a last romance with Marta Fascina, a parliamentarian from Forza Italia, a former model, then 30 years old. During the last months of her life, she will become a privileged interlocutor for all those who seek to reach the aging Cavaliere, weakened by a long Covid and multiple cardiac alerts. Condemned to ever shorter public appearances, the former prime minister left the Grazioli palace in central Rome, spending most of his time in his villa in Arcore. His relatives convinced him one last time, in February 2022, to try his luck for the election to the presidency of the Republic, but his candidacy fizzled.
A few weeks later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, decided by his friend Vladimir Putin, to whom he never ceased to show his friendship, will complete the marginalization of the Cavaliere and his party, increasingly isolated within the European Parliament. By declaring in February 2023 that the Russian offensive of February 24, 2022 was caused by “attacks” from Ukraine and blaming President Zelensky for the war, the former council speaker will force his ally Giorgia Meloni, more than embarrassed, to recall her “firm support” for Ukraine. But, for most observers, this umpteenth provocation by the former strongman of the right will be analyzed less as proof of a political disagreement than as proof of the weakening of a very old man, having lost for months all caught up in reality.