An Evening Spent with Berlusconi: The Italian Prime Minister’s Favorite Political Figure After the Referendum to Putin and Ukraine
His party formed a coalition government with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Berlusconi’s comments on Putin and the war in Ukraine continued to cause headaches for the Italian government.
Berlusconi was still a political figure. 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 was elected to a Senate seat in the upcoming 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.
When the European debt crisis ravaged Italy in 2011, it forced him to step down as prime minister for the final time.
The secret to Berlusconi’s popularity was not comprehended by foreign commentators. Italians dislike moral principles, according to Viroli. They love someone who tells them it is wrong to ignore civic duties and violate the laws.
And while his schoolboy pranks, off-color jokes and racist remarks left him increasingly shunned on the international stage, he became the longest-serving prime minister in Italian history — governing at different times between 1994 and 2011, for a total of approximately nine years.
Silvio Berlusconi: An Italian Prime Minister, Premier, and Chairman of the Mediaset, Football Association and the AC Milan Soccer Club
No leader in the history of democracy has ever been able to concentrate himself in his own hands. That’s the reason I use the word tyranny.
With no conflict-of-interest legislation in place to stop him, Berlusconi not only kept his TV networks as prime minister, he won control of all state-run broadcasting as well.
Berlusconi moved to fill thevacuum in the early 1990s when the political establishment was brought to its knees by bribes. He sold Italians a rosy vision of prosperity and lower taxes through his rags-to-riches story.
In the 1994 general elections, Berlusconi swept to power. The government crumbled just seven months later but, over the next two decades, he showed the world that humility was not one of his virtues.
By the 1980s, it had grown to Italy’s biggest media empire, Mediaset. That allowed Berlusconi to branch out, and he went on to own Italy’s largest publishing house, the newspaper Il Giornale and the AC Milan soccer club.
If somebody had told me that this was the beginning of a new media and political empire, I would laugh at it.
Berlusconi bragged that his career started as a singer on cruise ships. He moved on to construction and real estate, and built an empire — television networks, newspapers, publishing houses, a top soccer team and much 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.
A Tale of Two Faces: From Wall Street to Central Power: Vladimir Putin and Alvin Bragg in a New York City, after the 2016 Russian Referendum
He 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 incessantly praised his longtime friend Vladimir Putin. Suppressed by opponents, he was ousted 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 and a penchant for kitsch furniture and lewd jokes. Perhaps most important, they both possessed an instinctive ability to tap into the passions of the populace. One came from real estate, the other from media: They met halfway, in the borderland of entertainment. They also shared a predilection for the politics of paranoia. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, was a “psychopath” before Mr. Trump called him a “witch hunt” and denounced judges who were trying to destroy him.