2023-06-12 16:44:18
He has been the undisputed protagonist of Italy’s politics, business, football, justice and popular culture for the past 40 years. With the death this Monday of Silvio Berlusconi at the age of 86, due to complications linked to leukemia that forced him to be admitted to the San Raffaele hospital in Milan last Friday, the most influential Italian of recent decades dies: successful in business, four times prime minister, media magnate, winner of five European football Cups as president of AC Milan, universal seducer, even of minors, and person “most persecuted by the magistracy of all the times and the entire history of men throughout the world”, as he used to say to defend himself against his multiple legal problems.
The former ‘Cavaliere’, a title he lost in 2014 after being sentenced the previous year for tax fraud, also leaves his party, Forza Italia (FI), an orphan of leadership, one of the political groups that support the current conservative government led by Giorgia Meloni. Created to fill the power vacuum left by the ‘Tangentopoli’ corruption scandal in the 1990s, which ended up taking the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party by storm, FI has been the hegemonic formation of the centre-right for years Italian until being advanced in recent times by its partners in the conservative block, the League of Matteo Salvini and Brothers of Italy, Meloni’s party. In these almost four decades, all Italian politicians have revolved around him, divided between allies and detractors, since Berlusconi, with his controversial language and unusual methods, did not leave anyone indifferent.
Although he always resisted leaving the front row, to the point that he was planning to participate in an IF event last weekend, Berlusconi’s death could not surprise his compatriots. Since he fell ill with Covid-19 in September 2020, he was forced to suffer various hospitalizations for pneumonia, which aggravated some of the ailments he already had, such as a chronic inflammatory pathology and heart problems that forced him to wear a pacemaker for years. . Added to these difficulties was a serious urinary tract infection and complications caused by chronic leukemia.
The four sons of the tycoon, to whom he ceded daily control of his companies, such as the Mondadori publishing house or the Mediaset audiovisual conglomerate, rushed to the San Raffaele hospital in Milan when the news of his death broke. In all his last hospital convalescences he was also accompanied by his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, who was 54 years younger than him. During the afternoon of this Monday, his lifeless body was transferred to his Villa San Martino mansion, located in Arcore, a town on the outskirts of Milan, where the private burning chapel was installed. For reasons of public order, it was decided that there would be no funeral chapel open to the general public at the Mediaset headquarters, as originally planned. Wednesday will be when the state funerals are held in the Duomo of the Lombard capital and national mourning will be proclaimed. The head of state, Sergio Mattarella, and the prime minister, Meloni, who canceled all the events on her agenda and considered that Berlusconi had been “one of the most influential Italians” in history, will attend the funeral.
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It is expected that some international leaders will also be present at the funeral, whom the magnate surprised with his peculiar way of doing politics. With it, he became an inspirational figure for controversial leaders in other countries, such as Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who adopted some of the populist methods that Berlusconi had deployed in Italy to seduce voters. Although he always liked to present himself as a “moderate” and “liberal”, his was a peculiar brand of nationalism that he amassed since his entry into politics in 1994, when he introduced himself saying: “Italy is the country that I love”.
Los ‘flowers’
Despite these usual proclamations, the truth is that the magnate’s last experience in government was calamitous. He was forced to step down in 2011 when the country seemed on the verge of bankruptcy due to the ups and downs of his Cabinet and the financial crisis. In previous years, in addition, the scandal known as ‘bunga bunga’ broke out for his erotic parties with young girls, which led to a series of legal proceedings from which he emerged unharmed, but which confirmed that he had sexual relations with a minor. Until his last few years, Berlusconi was bragging about his role as an ‘alpha male’, which he used as a tool to connect with the average Italian, generally macho.
Another of the magnate’s great moles came from the origin of his fortune. Although he always presented himself as a self-made man, who began selling vacuum cleaners and singing on cruise ships to build a multimillion-dollar empire, he never fully dispelled doubts about possible mob support in his early days. These suspicions were motivated by the sentence that fell to Marcello Dell’Utri, for years his right hand, for his relationship with the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, although he was later acquitted.
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