Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media magnate turned trailblazing populist, has died aged 86, marking the end of a controversial career that transformed the country’s politics.
As Italy’s longest-serving postwar prime minister, Berlusconi led the nation in stints totalling almost a decade that were marked by criminal investigations into his business affairs and sex scandals.
Even towards the end of his life, he was an active player in Italian politics, playing a key role in the political crisis that brought down former prime minister Mario Draghi’s government last summer, and then helping to form Giorgia Meloni’s ruling coalition.
Berlusconi’s death comes months after it was revealed he had been battling leukaemia. He spent more than six weeks in hospital from early April before returning on Friday.
It raises questions about the division of power within Meloni’s rightwing coalition, as well as the future of his Forza Italia party, given the lack of a clear successor to Berlusconi.
“The party cannot survive the end of Berlusconi,” said political scientist Giovanni Orsina. “It’s a party that has always been very personal and very divided itself.”
Meloni, who ascended to Italy’s national political stage by serving as a youth minister in Berlusconi’s last government, praised her late mentor as “one of the most influential men in the history of Italy.”
Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-right League party — the third member of Meloni’s coalition — said he had lost “a great friend”.
Foreign minister Antonio Tajani, a longtime ally who was entrusted with running Forza Italia during Berlusconi’s recent stay in hospital, said on Twitter that he was experiencing “enormous grief,” and thanked the departed leader.
Berlusconi’s style of politics provided a template for other populist politicians, including former US president Donald Trump and Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
“He Americanised Italian politics,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political-science professor at Luiss university in Rome. “He used marketing techniques to sell his product across ideological borders.”
Even as Berlusconi’s personal brand diminished in recent years, his political legacy has endured in Meloni’s rightwing coalition, whose three constituent parties he first brought together when he first plunged into politics.
“He is the man who unified the Italian right, made it acceptable and competitive,” said D’Alimonte. “This is his historic legacy.”
Berlusconi began his career as a real estate developer before moving into broadcasting in the 1970s, building a monopoly in private television.
He entered the political stage in 1994 at the age of 57, by which time he was well known as the wisecracking owner of a powerful entertainment empire — and Italy’s richest man. He went on to shape Italian politics with his rightwing Forza Italia, which he built using his personal fortune and the apparatus of his vast entertainment empire.
Berlusconi’s years in power were overshadowed by numerous criminal investigations into allegations of wrongdoing, which ranged from false accounting to bribery and illegal political funding.
His “bunga bunga” sex parties, and prosecution on charges of paying for sex with a teenage belly dancer, also tarnished his final term, despite his eventual acquittal.
Berlusconi was forced out of power in 2011 at the height of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis when markets and European partners saw the by-then discredited leader as a liability who was unable to restore market confidence.
Though he remained a senator, a tax fraud conviction in 2013 led to his expulsion from the senate and a ban on holding public office until 2018. However, he returned to the senate in a late comeback after last year’s general election and campaigned alongside Meloni as one of the trio of leaders in her rightwing coalition.
His longstanding friendship with Russian president Vladimir Putin proved to be a liability for Meloni’s government: Berlusconi publicly expressed his admiration for the Russian leader at a time when she was seeking to convince allies about Italy’s commitment to Kyiv in its defence against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In an unusually emotional letter of condolence, Putin described Berlusconi as a “true patriot” who was “deservedly considered the patriarch of Italian politics” and would be remembered in Russia for bringing the two countries closer together.
“For me, Silvio was a dear and true friend,” Putin wrote. “I was always sincerely in awe of his wisdom . . . During each one of our meetings I literally got charged by his unbelievable energy of life, his optimism, and his sense of humor.”
Reaction also poured in from other parts of the world.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán shared a photo of himself with Berlusconi, saying “gone is the great fighter,” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was a “a great friend of Israel and stood by us at all times.”
Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, described him as “capable, shrewd and most important, true to his word,” recalling his “personal support” for the UK’s 2005 Olympic bid.
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome and Max Seddon in Riga
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