From an early age, Silvio Berlusconi had been interested in extending the human life span beyond its known limits. It was an ambition that he shared with his friend and business partner, the avaricious priest Don Luigi Verzé. “We were building an organization that would study how to live until the age of 120 years,” he recalled, much later:

We had everything planned. We bought some land near Verona, and we began the project. We brought in the most famous gerontologists, the best and the brightest. And then Don Verzé died. (1)

Berlusconi was not ready to die. Physically speaking, his life could be viewed as a series of battles fought against the aging process — ongoing campaigns in the ultimate war against death. This took the form of vigorous daily exercise routines, an obsession with personal hygiene and a meticulous attention to self-grooming, all of which culminated in the epic struggle against hair loss that lasted for two decades and transfixed a nation. Perhaps the greatest weapon of all was his dedication to the cult of positive thinking. Berlusconi’s outlook was optimistic, even utopian, and in his ideal realm everybody would be young and energetic and look good. Immaculate Caraceni suits, a healthy hairline and a permanent tan all had their own spiritual qualities but ultimately served the same end — to signal physical and psychological omnipotence. Umberto Scapagnini, Berlusconi’s personal doctor, once described his patient as “technically immortal” and dedicated part of his career to this pursuit of longevity. The “elixir of youth” prescribed by ‘Dr. Fuck’ boosted Berlusconi’s libido well into his seventies, with dire political consequences.

Like Don Verzé, Berlusconi could not cheat time. His death from leukemia at the age of 86 will have no real impact on the Italian political scene, but it does mark the passing of one of Europe’s great cultural and political innovators. If Italy is the political laboratory of Europe, then what Berlusconi created with Forza Italia in 1994 is part of that tradition: he pioneered a political style that would eventually be replicated across the continent. This journey began with a residential complex built on the outskirts of Milan, underneath the flight paths of Linate airport. For Berlusconi, this was more than simply a housing project: he was curating a model community. “I wanted to continue with my dream of building new towns,” he told the American journalist Alan Friedman, “: 

My idea was to achieve this with a very modern style of urban planning for the time that included lots of green, lots of bicycle paths, roads and walkways. We had to build a place where a young mother could send her kids to school without worrying, where you could love and work and shop and pray and go to the sports club and use the tennis courts and swimming pools and have everything that a family could desire. My idea was to make it possible to do everything at Milano Due so that you would never have to leave. (2)

Completed in the late ’70s, Milano Due would target an emerging breed of bankers, business executives and media operators who were in the process of reviving Milan and creating “a kind of counter-counter-culture” (3) that would eventually transform the entire country. At the same time, it sent a personal message to Berlusconi’s allies and rivals, demonstrating the power and reach of an emerging political network that would elevate him onto the national stage: with the help of Don Verzé, he was able to secure the peace of his residents by getting Linate’s flight paths diverted. 

One of Berlusconi’s early innovations was the creation of Milano Due’s own private cable TV station, a service that contained the seed of his first commercial network, Canale 5. Throughout the 1980s, Berlusconi led a populist assault on RAI’s national monopoly, investing funds from private advertisers in Hollywood film rights, sleazy game shows and foreign imports (Dallas, Dynasty, The Smurfs) and broadcasting them simultaneously on regional stations scattered across the country. For the intelligentsia and their political allies this was a cultural apocalypse, but the Italians were ready for it — they wanted what Berlusconi was offering. This was a cultural shift with political implications, as Mediaset president Fidele Confalonieri quickly recognised:

You have to understand the context, the way things were back then. By the 1980s, Italy had been living through years of recession and austerity and Red Brigades terrorism and the strong and continuing influence of the Italian Communist Party on society. In that context it was pretty revolutionary for Silvio Berlusconi to launch his commercial TV challenge against RAI. He was going against the prevailing culture and mindset of the Italian establishment. He was offering an alternative lifestyle. That, in itself, was a political act. (4)

When the courts tried to exact revenge by closing down his network, they inadvertently provoked what could be called The Great Smurf Revolt. “The public rebelled,” Berlusconi recalled, 

There were children protesting in the streets, carrying placards that read ‘Give Us Back The Smurfs!’ We had entered into the lives of the ordinary people and we had become part of the family life of millions of Italians. (5)

This time, Berlusconi was rescued by his political patron, the Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. It is one of the peculiarities of Berlusconi’s early career that the main emissary of the Reagan revolution in Italy would find his closest political ally in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Except that, put in context, this wasn’t strange at all. The Craxian Socialists of the 1980s were a new breed of reformer: anti-Communist and pro-NATO, they were also intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, particularly themselves. Their social liberalism was matched by a ferocious economic liberalism, exalting competition, individualism, entrepreneurship and innovation. They preached a permissive consumer creed that was nominally on the left but was also fatally attracted to power and wealth. The PSI hierarchy was the party of Milano da bere, a corrupt and opulent world of expensive nightclubs, exclusive restaurants, tailored clothes, haute couture mistresses, recreational drugs and fast cars. This was the New Italy built on the Milanese stock exchange, the city’s elite fashion houses and the new empire of commercial television: a precursor to Berlusconi’s own ‘Italian dream’. As Paul Ginsborg wrote:

to be a Socialist politician in Italy in these years meant to have a portable telephone and a BMW, to mix with high flying lawyers and businessmen, to lunch at Matarel or Savini in Milan’s Galleria, to have a good line of conversation on information technology and to take exotic holidays. (6)

This was the surface of things, but the foundations revealed a complex network of bribery, kickbacks and mafia contacts that would prove fatal for the PSI and most of the Italian political class. In this context, Craxi was the king of graft: he kept a villa in Tunisia (to which he fled after being investigated for corruption in 1992), apartments in New York and Barcelona, and occupied an entire floor of the Hotel Raphael in Rome where he entertained his mistress, the Tenebrae and Inferno starlet Ania Pieroni. (Berlsuconi would also claim his own Argento victim: Veronica Lario, who famously had her arm chopped off in the bloodbath that concluded Tenebrae, would become his mistress and second wife.) The great unraveling began in Milan when the Socialist politician Mario Chiesa tried to flush 30 million lire of bribes down the toilet as the police raided his apartment. Publicly disowned by Craxi, Chiesa brought the whole house down: Tangentopoli led to Clean Hands which led to the destruction of the First Republic.

Milan was the powerbase of Craxi and this was the most important thing for Berlusconi: it was the foundation of their political and business partnership as well as their genuine personal connection (Craxi was godfather to Berlusconi’s daughter with Lario and Berlusconi would later be accused of transferring millions of lire to him in Tunisia). In contrast to the Communists with their intellectual tradition and theoretical canon, television was the primary mode of communication for the Socialists and so Berlusconi was important to them: in his hands, the PSI message was reduced to a form of public relations crafted around the ruthless charisma of Craxi himself. “By the early 1980s,” wrote Michael Ledeen, “[Craxi] had become the John F. Kennedy of Italian politics, and in Milan, as in Rome, the most glamorous women, the elite of Italian cinema, the new pinup stars of Italian business, and the heroes of Italian soccer joined the party” (7). Craxi was the dominant personality of the PSI, the alpha male, the apex predator, providing a political template for Berlusconi himself. Every element had been put in place to make sense of this strange alliance between the capitalist media baron and the Milanese Socialists: the love of money, the pursuit of power, a relaxed attitude to political principle, a pro-business Lombard identity, a rampant consumer culture, fantastic women, but most of all a dedication to the image. 

In the ruins of the First Republic, when Berlusconi finally decided to enter politics, the power of the image was his guiding principle. He was already a television evangelist in one very specific sense: he believed that the world presented on television superseded reality and could therefore be used to shape that reality for the better. As he once told an adviser: “if something is not on television, it doesn’t exist. Not a product, a politician or an idea.” Combined with this belief was his self-described role as a “missionary of commercial television” in Italy: Berlusconi considered his assault on the commanding heights of RAI to be a key battle in the cultural and political liberation of the country he loved. Where others saw predation and monopoly, he saw deliverance and emancipation; he was helped by the fact that viewers and advertisers largely agreed. The legal cases that followed his entry into television and politics were, from this perspective, rooted in the challenge he presented to the monopolies and interests of the “left-wing” establishment. He dismissed each case as politically motivated, publicly accusing Italian magistrates of conspiring with “Communist enemies” to destroy him, just like they did to Craxi. For Berlusconi, truth was a matter of perception: he had alternative facts, his own truth, and if this truth did not match the ‘reality’ being presented by his enemies, then he had a duty to transform that reality. 

It was Berlusconi, more than anybody else, who led Italy into the new world of mass media and consumerism. He made the postmodern condition a living reality for millions of Italians. He was a man made for the age of seduction, simulation and hyperreality; if he didn’t exist, Umberto Eco would have had to invent him. His mutable values and understanding of truth and reality were primed to exploit the triumph of relativism, the deconstruction of meaning and the end of ideology. He was an unconscious apostle of the Society of the Spectacle, a concept that was both useful and natural to him and that he sought to build rather than destroy. He safely navigated the corruption scandals that undid the First Republic and went on to play a key role in dismantling the sclerotic structures of the old cultural and political elites of Italy, constructing a new Empire of Images in their place. Like Rupert Murdoch, his values and beliefs were conservative but his instincts and his actions were disruptive and radical. Both men helped to create a new political reality, but in Italy Berlusconi took this a step further by deciding to become its face. 

The legacy of Berlusconi’s political career is less significant for what he did (or didn’t do) in office than for the political style he created. The content of the ideology that littered his speeches and articles was fairly consistent and suited his business interests, but it was politically superficial. Free market liberalism was the creed he espoused and probably did genuinely believe in, but it was not what he delivered or prioritized when he was in power (judicial and constitutional reform took on greater urgency as the courts hunted him down). Berlusconi’s innovations had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with organization and presentation. Forza Italia gave Italy a type of politics it had never seen before: a party rooted in a private corporation and exploiting the new political technologies of market research, advertising, branding, commerce and mass media. There were precedents, which the new Berlusconi political machine drew upon: polling techniques perfected by James Carvell for the ‘91 Clinton campaign; advertising methods developed by Saatchi & Saatchi for the Conservatives in ‘87 and ‘92; the Labour party rebranding of ‘87 (although this had echoes of Craxi’s own adoption of the red carnation as a party emblem). But Berlusconi took all of these political tools and used them to create a new political party with no traditional roots or political base within a matter of months and then win power. 

Berlusconi always insisted that he was not a professional politician but an entrepreneur. In truth, he was a political entrepreneur and one of the most skilled and creative in Europe at that time. The 1994 Forza Italian election campaign was his masterpiece: the Italian public and what remained of the old political parties (all operating under new names but showing no ability to successfully rebrand) did not know what had hit them. Berlusconi unleashed a phalanx of untested candidates firmly embedded in the Fininvest family and instructed to pay towards their own media training and ‘kit del candidato’ (“a luxurious bag ‘full of surprises’ — ties, adhesives, lapel badges, a videocassette with the party’s programme, musical cassettes of Forza Italia’s anthem to sing along to’, 8). Forza Italia combined the corporate sales pitch with the lifestyle brand to shape an entirely new political product, communicated in simple soundbites and mediated by images. The core message that the party presented was simultaneously vague and direct: Italy needed Berlusconi to save the country from “Communism” and associated calamities. (Indeed, Berlusconi needed power to save his TV empire from being dismantled by the state.) Policy statements, such as they were, were not promises and certainly not commitments, but tactical messages designed to sell the product rather than articulate a party programme. Winning power was the only priority. 

In the event, this wasn’t a complete success and Berlusconi had to cobble together an unlikely coalition with Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League and Gianfranco Fini’s postfascist National Alliance in order to win. But this fragile marriage provided Berlusconi with the opportunity to launch another political innovation: a coalition of right-wing parties that would eventually help nurture the rhetoric and policy platforms of a new European populism. This was a testament to Berlusconi’s opportunism and personal ambition, but also revealed his almost total lack of ideological commitment or principle. In fact, the abandonment of ideology was part of the point and the appeal. Despite the constituencies and votes that his coalition partners provided, it was Berlusconi who would always benefit from these arrangements, as the most visible and popular leader of the New Right that he had, essentially, created himself. He was a billionaire with suspected mafia links and a historical connection to the old disgraced Socialist elite and yet he was able to present himself as a man of the people and a fresh alternative to the politics of the First Republic. He continued to promise deregulation and privatization while channeling the anti-establishment, anti-elite disaffection that fuelled the rise of a party like the Northern League. By adopting this pose he created a model for an Italian anti-politics that would eventually find its purest form in the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo. His ‘Contract with the Italians’ shamelessly plagiarized Newt Gingrich, but his rhetoric both defined and was shaped by parochial anxieties – notably, the increasingly important issue of immigration. Enemies were dismissed as “Communists”, a term he used promiscuously and which came to symbolize a broader threat to liberty and private initiative posed by all politicians of the left, a broad category that included the technocrats and intellectuals of the liberal center (he held particular animus for Prodi and Draghi).

His attack on this “left” resonated widely and was therefore highly effective in political terms; it also displayed a certain relish in blurring truth and distorting reality. This example was useful for the other parties of the populist far-right that were beginning to advance across Europe. It could be argued that Berlusconi set a precedent for the post truth politics of the twenty-first century: mass media democratic populism combined with his own unique attitude towards reality to spawn a new mutant strain of political communication. As Indro Montanelli, the editor of Il Giornale when Berlusconi owned the paper, later remarked: “[he] is a man with an entirely personal view of the truth, so that whatever he says is true. He tells lies, but he believes them” (9). Berlusconi was known to tell prospective advertisers that “powerful images are more important than facts” (10) and, for him, reality was defined by perception and the primacy of the image. Directly linked to this highly personal understanding of truth was an undermining of the concept of objectivity. This is where Berlusconi fatally connected the power of mass media to the politics of anti-politics. Italy had lost its political bearings after the political purges of Clean Hands; the state became a blank slate and the public space a void. This vast chasm was most effectively exploited by Berlusconi and those new populist and far-right mutations, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, M5S and Fratelli d’Italia. The primacy of perception and presentation that undermined the belief in universal truth allowed this New Right to follow Berlusconi’s lead by manipulating facts and redefining reality in their own image. They didn’t invent anything: the popular desires and resentments they channeled were authentic enough, but they became increasingly skilled at crafting the public discourse around their own messages and imagery, harnessing technology to curate their own mass constituencies. Postfascists aside, these were the political progeny of Berlusconi.

It was odd, then, that during the election of 2022 — in a political environment that he had done more than anybody to shape — Berlusconi looked irrelevant, lost. He was running for office again and trying to capture the old magic. He took to TikTok to tell the world: “Italy Needs Me!” The result was not disastrous, but also not successful: he would be found flanking Giorgia Meloni, the woman he once claimed could not run to be mayor of Rome because she would have to look after her children, as she announced her first cabinet as Prime Minister. (The only person who looked more miserable here was Salvini, standing on the other side of her.) But he was still alive. He had survived the indignity of being barred from public office. The European elites had tried to kill him off. Angela Merkel could never forget, or forgive, being called an “unfuckable lard-arse” (“I never said it!” Berlusconi told a visibly delighted Gerhard Schroder). Sarkozy loathed him for other, not always tangible, reasons, exacerbated by his sudden passion to depose one of Berlusconi’s political pals, Gaddafi. Together they instigated a virtual coup d’etat during the Eurozone crisis, ejecting Berlusconi from office in favor of an unelected ‘technical administration’ led by Mario Monti (“Senior officials could be heard boasting: “We do regime change better than the Americans””, 11). This terminal humiliation was, in the end, nothing of the sort: he was still there, giving Meloni a run for her money, l’immortale.

The very things that the EU grandees despised about Berlusconi were the very things that kept him alive: his vulgarity, his personal ambition, his lack of shame, his sheer elan. This was Berlusconi’s own personal touch and it was the final key to his political success: the role of personality in post-ideological politics. What seemed unique to Berlusconi in this regard would eventually be adopted more widely. His distortions served to redefine ‘truth’ as another form of belief. What were seen as flaws by his opponents became assets in the eyes of his supporters. As Mariella Pandolfi told the New Yorker in 2003, 

the language that unites Italy today is Berlusconi’s television language. His grammar is dreadful. He gets the subjunctive wrong. Give him three seconds on television and he makes four mistakes. But you discover that everybody loves his mistakes. That’s his power. (12)

He defined the paradox of the new populists: here was a billionaire, a real estate and media tycoon, channeling the voice of the people. He could do this because so many voters admired his wealth and his success. The more he flaunted, the more they liked it. The bunga parties beneath the Renaissance paintings of Arcore; the replica Greek amphitheater and remote control volcano at his Sardinian Villa Certosa; the helicopter landing on the pitch of San Siro Stadium; the St Moritz pad purchased from Shah Reza Pahlavi. None of this mattered in the way it was supposed to. The ‘Communists’ that Berlusconi conjured out of the air as demons and phantasms did not, in fact, exist as a real threat: the old world of class loyalty that the PCI built their networks on had disintegrated. When Berlusconi declared, “I am the Italian dream!” enough people agreed (or at least didn’t care enough to object) for it to be important. His own grievances became public prejudices. His failures and his criminal convictions fed into everybody’s cynicism so that it did not matter; he would never really have to shoulder responsibility for his own actions. He created his own electorate out of the hollow space left by the Communists and the Church. He created a new culture, and so became a cultural phenomena in his own right. He simply did not understand what conflict of interest meant, or pretended not to, and, accordingly, broke the norms of democratic conduct. Whether he had been watching or not, Berlusconi’s greatest success was, finally, Trump: at the head of the greatest power on earth was a political creation that almost exactly fitted the style he set. But there was one more twist: looking at this kind of cracked mirror image, he did not like what he saw. This was the final indignity. 

1. Silvio Berlusconi quoted in Alan Friedman, My Way: Berlusconi In His Own Words (Biteback, 2015), p.40
2. Ibid., p.38
3. Alexander Stille, The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi (Penguin, 2007), p.28
4. Fidele Confalonieri quoted in Friedman, p.56
5. Silvio Berlusconi quoted in Friedman, p.60
6. Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents 1980-2001: Family, Civil Society, State (Penguin, 2003), p.151
7. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed (AEI Press, 1996), p.124
8. Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (Verso, 2004), pps.68-9
9. Indro Montanelli quoted in Stille, p.258
10. Stille, p.23
11. Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World (Penguin, 2018), p.412
12.  Mariella Pandolfi quoted in Jane Kramer, ‘All He Surveys’, The New Yorker, November 2, 2003