Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has died, aged 86, from complications arising from leukaemia. With him passes also a part of Italian history.

L’Italia è il Paese che amo. Qui ho le mie radici, le mie speranze, i miei orizzonti. Qui ho imparato, da mio padre e dalla vita, il mio mestiere di imprenditore. Qui ho appreso la passione per la libertà.

Italy is the country I love. Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here I learned, from my father and from life, my job as a businessman. Here I acquired my passion for liberty.

With these words, on 26 January 1994, Silvio Berlusconi announced he was founding a new political movement. It would change the course of modern Italian history.

He decided to scendere in campo (take the field), as he declared:

Perché noi crediamo nell’individuo, nella famiglia, nell’impresa, nella competizione, nello sviluppo, nell’efficienza, nel mercato libero e nella solidarietà, figlia della giustizia e della libertà.

Because we believe in the individual, in the family, in enterprise, in competition, in development, in efficiency, in the free market, and in solidarity, daughter of justice and liberty.

In a country that was overwhelmed by the tangentopoli (bribe city) scandals that were sweeping away its old political class that had governed the country since 1946, Berlusconi saw the danger that communism would fill the vacuum, particularly since its followers were wolves in sheep’s clothing:

Dicono di essere diventate liberaldemocratiche. Ma non è vero […] i loro più profondi convincimenti, i loro comportamenti sono rimasti gli stessi. Non credono nel mercato, non credono nell’iniziativa privata, non credono nel profitto, non credono nell’individuo.

They say they have become liberal democrats. But it’s not true. Their deepest convictions and behaviours are the same. They don’t believe in the market, they don’t believe in private enterprise, they don’t believe in profits, they don’t believe in the individual.

He did not want to live in an illiberal Italy governato da forze immature e da uomini legati a doppio filo a un passato politicamente ed economicamente fallimentare (governed by immature forces and by men tied hand in glove with a past that is a political and economic failure).

He created a new political party, Forza Italia! (taken from the cry of support to Italy’s national football team), to rally the country on to achieve the great things it was capable of.

He wanted to make Italy great again.

In the elections two months later, his party swept all before it. However, his political career would not be as successful as his business career. Even so, Berlusconi, il Cavaliere, as he was known, by the honour bestowed upon him for his services to his country even before he entered politics, was a pioneer in many endeavours, and he laid the path that later on was trodden by Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

He was the classic self-made man. The son of a bank manager, he graduated in law magna cum laude. He was responsible for major residential developments in and around his native Milan. He created Italy’s first major private media enterprise in opposition to State television. His daily newspaper, il Giornale, was on the verge of bankruptcy before he acquired it in 1977. Today it is still one of the few conservative voices in Italy in a media landscape dominated by the left.

In the 1980s he famously bought the AC Milan football team, saving it, too, from failure. By the end of the decade and into the 1990s the team was sweeping all before it in not only Italy’s national league, but in Europe, winning several European Cups (these days known as the Champions League), and doing so in style.

Berlusconi was the outsider when it came to politics, and that meant he had enemies. Two of his four governments fell because of coalition partners withdrawing support. Indeed, some, such as Gianfranco Fini, who for many years was seen as Berlusconi’s successor, formed their own parties, only to fail spectacularly.

Thanks to his political enemies within and without, his government could not pass many of the reforms Italy so desperately needed. His chief adviser for labour market reform, Marco Biagi, was shot dead by communist terrorists. Even so, he pressed on. His second government introduced laws to control illegal immigration that proved successful (those laws were repealed by successive left-wing governments) and reduce business and individual taxes.

Being the political outsider, from the moment he won the 1994 elections, accusations of bribery, tax evasion, and accounting fraud were levelled against him by his opponents and pursued with alacrity by a politicised judiciary (sound familiar?). All these accusations ended up being dismissed, and any convictions overturned.

The elite, though, in 2011 got its wish. Mario Draghi, President of the ECB at the time, engineered a sovereign debt to justify removing a democratically elected Prime Minister, and installed a bunch of euro-friendly technocrats to ‘save the single currency’. Berlusconi, though, did not give up on his political career, leading his party and its allies to success in European Parliament elections throughout the decade, himself winning a seat in Brussels in 2019. At the time, he prophetically warned that China was the true threat for future generations.

Unfortunately, Berlusconi’s private life was often mired in scandal, much of the time of his own doing, and his enemies wasted no time in weaponising this against him, thus needlessly sapping energy and momentum from his efforts in the political arena.

Berlusconi was a visionary who laid out with clarity core centre-right philosophy. One of his greatest achievements, surely, was identifying Giorgia Meloni as a future leader. He made her a minister following his election victory in 2008. The current Italian prime minister since her election last has worked tirelessly to implement the same philosophy that Berlusconi outlined back in 1994. Italy owes him a great debt.

Addio, Presidente.

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