Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi; 29 September 1936 – 12 June 2023) was an Italian media tycoon and politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy in four governments from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 and 2008 to 2011.

He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 2013, and has served as a member of the Senate of the Republic since 2022, and previously from March to November 2013, and as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019, and previously from 1999 to 2001.

Berlusconi is the controlling shareholder of Mediaset and owned the Italian football club A.C. Milan from 1986 to 2017. He is nicknamed Il Cavaliere (The Knight) for his Order of Merit for Labour; he voluntarily resigned from this order in March 2014.[4] In 2018, Forbes ranked him as the 190th richest man in the world with a net worth of US$8 billion. In 2009, Forbes ranked him 12th in the list of the World's Most Powerful People due to his domination of Italian politics throughout more than twenty years at the head of the centre-right coalition.

Berlusconi was Prime Minister for nine years in total, making him the longest serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, and the third longest-serving since Italian unification, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti. He was the leader of the centre-right party Forza Italia from 1994 to 2009, and its successor party The People of Freedom from 2009 to 2013. Since November 2013, he has led a revived Forza Italia. Berlusconi was the senior G8 leader from 2009 until 2011, and he currently holds the record for hosting G8 summits (having hosted three summits in Italy). After serving nearly 19 years as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the country's lower house, he became a member of the Senate following the 2013 Italian general election.

On 1 August 2013, Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud by the Supreme Court of Cassation. His four-year prison sentence was confirmed, and he was banned from holding public office for two years. Aged 76, he was exempted from direct imprisonment, and instead served his sentence by doing unpaid community service. In Italy, three years are automatically pardoned; he had been sentenced to a gross imprisonment for more than two years, and the anti-corruption Severino law, which banned him from six-years, expelled him from the Senate. Berlusconi pledged to stay leader of Forza Italia throughout his custodial sentence and public office ban. After his ban ended, Berlusconi ran for and was elected as an MEP at the 2019 European Parliament election. He returned to the Senate after winning a seat in the 2022 Italian general election.

Berlusconi was the first person to assume the premiership without having held any prior government or administrative offices. He is known for his populist political style and brash personality. In his long tenure, he was often accused of being an authoritarian leader and a strongman. Berlusconi still remains a controversial figure who divides public opinion and political analysts. Supporters emphasize his leadership skills and charismatic power, his fiscal policy based on tax reduction, and his ability to maintain strong and close foreign relations with both the United States and Russia. In general, critics address his performance as a politician and the ethics of his government practices in relation to his business holdings. Issues with the former include accusations of having mismanaged the state budget and of increasing the Italian government debt. The second criticism concerns his vigorous pursuit of his personal interests while in office, including benefitting from his own companies' growth due to policies promoted by his governments, having vast conflicts of interest due to ownership of a media empire, with which he has restricted freedom of information, and being blackmailed as leader because of his turbulent private life.

Family background and personal life

Berlusconi was born in 1936 in Milan, where he was raised in a middle-class family. His father, Luigi Berlusconi (1908–1989), was a bank employee, and his mother, Rosa Bossi (1911–2008), a housewife. He was the first of three children; he had a sister, Maria Francesca Antonietta (1943–2009), and has a brother, Paolo (born 1949). He has ten grandchildren.

 

After completing his secondary school education at a Salesian college, Berlusconi studied law at the University of Milan, graduating with honours in 1961, with a thesis on the legal aspects of advertising. He was not required to serve the standard one-year stint in the Italian army which was compulsory at the time. During his university studies, he was an upright bass player in a group formed with the now Mediaset Chairman and amateur pianist Fedele Confalonieri and occasionally performed as a cruise ship crooner. In later life, he wrote A.C. Milan's anthem with the Italian music producer and pop singer Tony Renis and Forza Italia's anthem with the opera director Renato Serio. With the Neapolitan singer Mariano Apicella, he wrote two Neapolitan song albums: Meglio 'na canzone in 2003 and L'ultimo amore in 2006.

In 1965, Berlusconi married Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, and they had two children: Maria Elvira, better known as Marina (born 1966), and Pier Silvio (born 1969). By 1980, Berlusconi had established a relationship with the actress Veronica Lario (born Miriam Bartolini), with whom he subsequently had three children: 

• Barbara (born 1984),
• Eleonora (born 1986) and
• Luigi (born 1988).

He was divorced from Dall'Oglio in 1985, and married Lario in 1990. By this time, Berlusconi was a well-known entrepreneur, and his wedding was a notable social event. One of his best men was Bettino Craxi, a former prime minister and leader of the Italian Socialist Party. In May 2009, Lario announced that she was to file for divorce.

On 28 December 2012, Berlusconi was ordered to pay his ex-wife Veronica Lario $48 million a year in a divorce settlement that was filed Christmas Day but could keep the $100 million house they live in with their three children.

In April 2017, Berlusconi appeared in a video promoting a vegetarian Easter campaign. He was shown cuddling lambs he had adopted to save from slaughtering for the traditional Easter Sunday feast; he did not confirm or deny whether he himself is a vegetarian.

Divorce and allegations of sexual misconduct

At the end of April 2009, Berlusconi's wife Veronica Lario, who would divorce him several years later, wrote an open letter expressing her anger at Berlusconi's choice of young, attractive female candidates—some with little or no political experience—to represent the party in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Berlusconi demanded a public apology, claiming that for the third time his wife had "done this to me in the middle of an election campaign", and stated that there was little prospect of his marriage continuing. On 3 May, Lario announced she was filing for divorce. She claimed that Berlusconi had not attended his own sons' 18th birthday parties, and that she "cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors" and "is not well".

Noemi Letizia, the girl in question, gave interviews to the Italian press, revealing that she calls Berlusconi papi (daddy), that they often spent time together in the past, and that Berlusconi would take care of her career as showgirl or politician, whichever she opted to pursue. Berlusconi claimed that he knew Letizia only through her father and that he never met her alone without her parents.

On 14 May, la Repubblica published an article alleging many inconsistencies in Berlusconi's story and asked him to answer ten questions to clarify the situation.

Ten days later, Letizia's ex-boyfriend, Luigi Flaminio, claimed that Berlusconi had contacted Letizia personally in October 2008 and said she had spent a week without her parents at Berlusconi's Sardinian villa around New Year's Eve 2009, a fact confirmed later by her mother. On 28 May 2009, Berlusconi said that he had never had "spicy" relations with Letizia, and said that if any such thing had occurred, he would have resigned immediately.

On 17 June 2009, Patrizia D'Addario, a 42-year-old escort and retired actress from Bari, Italy, claimed that she had been recruited twice to spend the evening with Berlusconi. Berlusconi denied any knowledge of D'Addario being a paid escort: "I have never paid a woman... I have never understood what satisfaction there is if the pleasure of conquest is absent". He also accused an unspecified person of manoeuvring and bribing D'Addario.

On 26 June 2009, the "ten questions" to Berlusconi were reformulated by la Repubblica, and subsequently republished multiple times. On 28 August 2009, Berlusconi sued Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, the owner company of the newspaper, and classified the ten questions as "defamatory" and "rhetorical".

Berlusconi's lifestyle has raised eyebrows in Catholic circles, with vigorous criticism being expressed in particular by Avvenire, owned by the Episcopal Conference of Italy. This was followed by the publication in the newspaper il Giornale (owned by the Berlusconi family) of details with regard to legal proceedings against the editor of Avvenire, Dino Boffo, which seemed to implicate him for a harassment case against the wife of his ex-partner. Dino Boffo has always declared the details of the proceedings to be false, although he has not denied the basic premise.

After a period of tense exchanges and polemics, Boffo resigned from his editorial position on 3 September 2009, and the assistant editor Marco Tarquinio became editor ad interim.

On 22 September 2009, after a press conference, Berlusconi declared that he had asked his ministers not to respond anymore to questions regarding "gossip". He stated also that the Italian press should talk only about the "successes" of Italian Government in internal and foreign policies, adding also that the press now will be able only to ask questions relating to his administration and not to gossip.

During a contested episode of AnnoZero on 1 October 2009, the journalist and presenter Michele Santoro interviewed Patrizia D'Addario. She stated she was contacted by Giampaolo Tarantini – a businessman from Bari – who already knew her and requested her presence at Palazzo Grazioli with "the President". D'Addario also stated that Berlusconi knew that she was a paid escort.