On the morning of 12 June 2023, Italy’s former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi died in Milan. The Italian government, led by Berlusconi’s far-right ally Giorgia Meloni, proclaimed a day of national mourning on Wednesday 14 June. This was the first time a former Italian prime minister got this honour.
The news of Mr Berlusconi’s death immediately reopened a polarised debate on his figure and everlasting impact on Italian society. For some, his success and long political career suffice to make him a statesman despite the many legal and sex scandals characterising his life. Others, however, cannot forget his responsibilities in deteriorating Italy’s democratic culture.
The four-time prime minister has often been a source of satire for the foreign press. His gaffes on the international stage were legendary. These often included racist, misogynistic or otherwise controversial remarks. As the late Queen Elizabeth II herself reportedly noticed during a G20 summit, his demeanour was in multiple instances unbecoming of a head of government.
In Italy, however, Silvio Berlusconi was much more than an institutional caricature. Considering how his 20 years in power came to define a whole era in the country’s history (the so-called Second Republic, 1994-2012) his figure acquires a much more sinister quality.
Overall, amongst the more moderate judgements, the German press provided a good starting point for an assessment of Mr Berlusconi’s career, calling him “Europe’s first populist.”
When he came to power by winning the 1994 general election, Mr Berlusconi was a wealthy entrepreneur who said he wanted to help his country. If you want, to make Italy great again. At the time, the Italian political system was recovering from a series of crises. After over a decade marked by internal political terrorism, the collapse of the USSR had led to the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party. Moreover, in 1993 a major corruption scandal had forced socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi to flee the country, irremediably alienating citizens from politics.
Crucially, Berlusconi didn’t emerge from a cultural vacuum. By the time he entered politics, he had controlled most of Italian commercial TV since the mid-1980s. He also owned prominent football team AC Milan, whose high-profile victories – notably five UEFA Champions Leagues – had skyrocketed his popularity.
Not only he pioneered Donald Trump’s anti-establishment, anti-political rhetoric, making the case that running a country is akin to running a business. He basically invented the brand of political communication which would bring Trump into office over 20 years later. He famously compared the intellectual level of the Italian “pubblico” – a word which interestingly means both “audience” and “the public” – to that of a preteen boy of mediocre intelligence. By controlling half of Italy’s free-to-air TV channels, he spoke directly to that boy, moulding him into not just a Berlusconi voter, but a true Berlusconist espousing neoliberal and reactionary ideals.
Before 1994, Berlusconi’s media company Fininvest obtained a favourable media legislation, which left it as the only de facto competitor of public Italian broadcaster Rai. Once Mr B. took office, the favourable treatment continued amidst a glaring conflict of interest.
While he could be compared to prominent influential businessmen like Trump and Rupert Murdoch, his business rival, Mr Berlusconi was more accurately an amalgamation of the two, and at the same time a much wider phenomenon. Arguably no businessman ever reached the amount of political, and crucially, legislative influence Mr B. attained in Italy.
Silvio Berlusconi’s reign dramatically reshaped Italy’s politics and culture at large. His involvement in multiple legal cases was particularly consequential. On the one hand, the tailored legislation he passed in parliament to escape prosecution altered the country’s whole judiciary system. On the other, his disdain for the law and the judiciary broke something in public morals. It is no exaggeration to say that Italy’s current reputation for corruption, bad governance and dishonesty comes down mostly to Mr B.’s legacy.
Also part of Berlusconi’s legacy is widespread misogyny and heteronormative bigotry, which make for Italy’s relatively poor human and civil rights record in Europe. Most significantly, however, Berlusconi initiated the rehabilitation of far-right political movements. He was the first prime minister to ever welcome a neo-fascist party in a governing coalition. In that same party, called National Alliance, a young Giorgia Meloni started her own political career in the 1990s.
Through the relentless erosion of public values that had once been universal, Mr Berlusconi undermined the very fibre of Italy’s institutions. His myopic and propagandistic management of the economy left an entire generation impoverished, forced to either suffer unfair working conditions or emigrate.
Obviously, it would be dishonest to condemn Silvio Berlusconi’s politics without acknowledging the responsibilities of his rivals, who could never offer an appealing alternative, and of the Italian public itself. Despite his questionable morals, authoritarian tendencies and less than flattering representation abroad, a plurality of Italian voters found Mr Berlusconi’s political and cultural message appealing. Moreover, his political and communication model was also successful abroad.
Mr Berlusconi’s death doesn’t mark the end of an era, far from it. What it could bring, instead, is some much-needed self-reflection on what we want the future of democracy to look like.
Words by Fran Di Fazio
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