Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has died. He was 86.
The billionaire businessman - who created Italy’s largest media company before transforming the country’s political landscape - had been suffering from leukaemia “for some time” and had recently developed a lung infection.
Berlusconi’s political career - in which he served as prime minister for three separate periods - saw him repeatedly bounce back from financial and sexual scandals, making him a hugely polarising figure in modern Italy.
Headlines were made around the world in 2010 when Berlusconi - then a sitting premier - faced charges of having paid for sex with an underage girl. He was eventually acquitted.
He was expelled by the Italian Senate in 2013, following a tax fraud conviction linked to his media business.
A court ordered him to carry out a year’s community service in an old peoples’ home in punishment for the crime. He was also banned from holding public office for six years.
After carrying out his community service, a court ruled he could once again hold public office. He won a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, before making a return to parliament last year when he won a seat in the Senate.
Un grande, enorme dolore.
— Guido Crosetto (@GuidoCrosetto) June 12, 2023
Lascia un vuoto enorme perché è stato un grande.
È finita un’epoca, si chiude un’era.
Gli ho voluto molto bene.
Addio Silvio.
Berlusconi was born into a modest family in northern Italy in 1936.
After stints as a cruise ship crooner, he made his first fortune in real estate deals in Milan in the 1960s and 70s. Berlusconi constantly denied repeated accusations that he received mafia money to underpin those initial investments.
Having built apartments, Berlusconi provided the tenants with their own television channel. The enterprise rapidly grew into a de facto national network that eventually broke the state monopoly, introducing Roman Catholic Italy to the delights of topless game shows and downmarket US soap operas.
Smothered by Italy’s red tape, it was almost impossible to get ahead without political patronage and when Berlusconi‘s chief protector, Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, fled abroad to escape corruption charges, the magnate decided to go into politics himself, naming his party Forza Italia (Go Italy!) after a football chant.
Italians lapped up Berlusconi‘s smiling reassurances that he knew how to fix the country, and within months they elected him prime minister.
His government lasted barely half a year, the coalition collapsing following news that he had been placed under investigation for corruption tied to his business interests.
Legal woes accompanied Berlusconi throughout his political career and he was convicted in at least seven cases on serious charges, including bribing a senator and paying off judges.
Those convictions were eventually overturned on appeal or swept from the courts by the statute of limitations that gives magistrates a set period of time to complete their prosecutions - time that one Berlusconi administration sharply reduced.
Berlusconi said he was the victim of leftist-led judicial persecution and the electorate sided with him, returning him to power in elections in 2001. Voted out of office in 2006, he stormed back in 2008, using his charm and negotiating skills to weave together often argumentative centre-right coalitions.
On the international stage he cultivated a particularly close bond with Russian President Vladimir Putin - a friendship he defended even following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drawing censure from across the political spectrum in the West.
Berlusconi‘s many critics say he used his power primarily to protect his own business interests, pointing to Italy’s weak economic record, hidebound bureaucracy and unchecked corruption during his lengthy stints in government.
He himself said he only entered politics to halt the left.
“Politics was never my passion. It made me lose a lot of time and energy. If I entered the ring, it was just to prevent the communists from taking power,” he told Chi magazine in an interview to mark his 80th birthday in 2016.
Voters repeatedly backed his can-do exuberance and Berlusconi survived a string of diplomatic gaffes and scandals, including allegations he had sex with an underage girl and hosted wild orgies in the form of his notorious “bunga bunga” parties.
Magistrates say he paid thousands of euros for sex with Moroccan-born nightclub dancer Karima El Mahroug, alias “Ruby the Heart Stealer”, when she was under-age.
He denied this but admitted springing her from a police station by saying she was the niece of then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. A court eventually acquitted him of having sex with a youth, saying he was not to know she was under 18.
Although Berlusconi made light of his reputation as a philanderer, his second wife Veronica Lario did not and she asked for a divorce, saying she could not live with a man who “frequented minors”.
She was initially awarded one of the biggest divorce payouts in Italian history - €1.4 million (£1.2 million) a month in maintenance. But like many court rulings that went against him, Berlusconi appealed and the sum was later reduced to zero.
He never remarried but in 2022, he held a “symbolic” marriage with his partner Marta Fascina, 53 years his junior, who wore a white bridal dress to the unofficial ceremony.
In 2011, Berlusconi was overwhelmed by the scale of Europe’s financial crisis and had to resign as prime minister.
Fresh humiliation followed in 2013, in the form of a tax fraud conviction linked to his media business, which saw him temporarily expelled from the Italian Senate and stripped of his cherished title, Il Cavaliere, or the Knight - a state decoration.
Under financial pressure, he sold his beloved AC Milan soccer team, while his efforts to turn his media group into a pan-European broadcasting giant never really took off.
A court ordered him to carry out a year’s community service in an old peoples’ home in punishment for his tax fraud.
After carrying out his community service, a court ruled he could once again hold public office. He won a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, before making a return from his parliamentary exile last year when he won a seat in the Senate.
Berlusconi was one of the most extraordinary characters to come out of Italy’s often bizarre political landscape - a flamboyant figure whose off-colour jokes alone would have killed a political career in most European Union countries.
Berlusconi himself had no regrets about his political career, although he clearly felt he was often betrayed.
“All I know is that in both foreign and domestic politics I never made a single mistake,” he told Chi magazine in 2016. “But when I come to think about it, I cannot recall the name of a single friend in politics.”
Berlusconi’s health had deteriorated in recent years, with open-heart surgery in 2016 and numerous hospital admissions since contracting Covid three years ago.
When he was hospitalised in September 2020 with severe coronavirus he was inundated with messages of goodwill from all quarters, marking his rehabilitation in Italian society.
Berlusconi left San Raffaele Hospital last month after six weeks of treatment for a lung infection linked to a chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia, a type of cancer that affects the white blood cells.
He was re-admitted to San Raffaele on Friday. The hospital previously said he was for scheduled medical checks, which were not related to “any criticality or alarm”.
Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto described news of his death of “a big, huge pain”. “He leaves a huge void because he was great,” he tweeted on Monday. “An era is over, an era is closing. I loved him very much. Goodbye Silvio.”
