A true friend of Putin, lover of women and “elegant dinners”, despising “communist” judges and the judiciary defined as “the cancer of the country”, Silvio Berlusconi, who died Monday June 12 at the age of 86, had a holdings of shareholdings listed on the stock exchange which is around 2.9 billion euros in market value. But he is above all the inventor of a new way of doing politics, populism, through the consensus obtained in a playful way through three essential things: football, with the purchase of AC Milan, television, and the publishing of books and newspapers.
Berlusconi began laying the foundations of his empire in the 1970s as a builder, a billion-dollar Milanese who already owned the huge Villa Arcore in Brianza, from where he carried out his political strategies until at the end. An entertainer from an early age, when he played French songs at student parties and then on cruises, a professional barker, a seller of household appliances during his law studies, Berlusconi had great ambitions and the ability to bring worlds together. of business and politics. Considered one of the greatest real estate speculators through his company Edilnord, he defined himself in 1977 as a “progressive”, and “practicing Catholic”, a “positive” man with dreams of grandeur: to be called upon to build cities in the world, being elected to the European Parliament, owning AC Milan.
At home, the pious and orgiastic aspects coexist: at home, he has a collection of paintings by Lombard painters of the 16th century, but no nudes so as not to offend his very religious wife, and at the same time, he continues to give him the image of a seducer who likes the company of very young women. A contradiction that well represents the tension present in Italian Christian society, between modesty and sin. And that we find in the commercial television with which the former President of the Council (three times) wrote the history of Italy.
By 1977 he already owned 15% of Indro Montanelli’s Giornale and had taken over TeleMilano, a private television station broadcasting from the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan. In the face of “too many anxiety-provoking factors today”, he offers “optimistic television” that talks about the problems of the city. Until it acquired, in the 1980s, the other channels that would constitute its vast media territory, in competition with RAI, public television. Those born in the 1980s remember it well. Afternoons and evenings enlivened by cartoons and television shows imported from the United States and Japan, broadcast on the networks of Mediaset, his juggernaut company. In the evening, an army of game shows entertained Italian families who had also learned, with the invention of television, the passive art of the sofa.
Young women with the easy wink wiggle their hips, stripped down in skin-tight bikinis and miniskirts, shiny boots and smiles, the “letterine” brighten up the evenings, with a mission to dance and then deliver letters with game instructions to the male animator, who directs the operations. Older gentlemen and ladies who starred in game shows and soap operas like Casa Vianello or OK, Il Prezzo è Giusto! have become myths in the cultural and social history of the country. It is also with the image of these mythological “almost retirees” that Berlusconi managed to reassure, to draw with him the voters who welcomed this large family that was his television, where carefree children, sexy women and funny old men. Berlusconi thus forges an idea of ??society and politics.
With his political decline, from 2011, when he had to relinquish power after losing the majority in the Chamber of Deputies, a very clear dividing line in Italian political life – between the right wing which wanted to embody the revolution liberal and the left wing which wished to protect the lower classes – disbanded. Once the Berlusconi era was over, this meant the advent of hybrid political formations oriented neither right nor left, such as the 5 Star Movement, born in 2012, or the liberal left of Renzi, a compromise between protective bodies and liberalization which turned out to be a failed chimera.
“The Cayman”, so named after a film by Nanni Moretti, extended its political influence, Berlusconiism, to the point that for twenty years everyone in Italy had to say they were pro or anti-Berlusconi. On one side, the last royal court in the history of Italy, made up of a crowd of flatterers and supporters, on the other, the detractors. A political tension that has inspired a vast cultural production, films, books, documentaries that have tried to grasp the meaning of this anomaly, an entrepreneur who has managed to move into politics, which has become a real style of leadership subsequently imitated abroad.
