- He has been the longest-serving Italian prime minister in the last 70 years, but also the most controversial.
The businessman, leader of Forza Italia and three times Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023), has died at the age of 86 in his hometown of Milan.
Suffering from leukaemia, Berlusconi was admitted to the intensive care unit of the San Raffaele hospital in Milan last April for pulmonary and cardiovascular problems
Despite his age, Berlusconi’s was still active in politics. We had seen him campaigning just a few months before for the general elections won by Giorgia Meloni in September 2022. Berlusconi appeared, a sprightly 85 years old, in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, supported by Meloni, then a candidate for the Government of Italy, and Matteo Salvini, of the far-right coalition.
Three days later, this block won the elections in Italy. Berlusconi entered as a senator on October 13, 2022, thus sealing his return to the government following his disqualification, in 2013, for a conviction of the prostitution of minors and abuse of authority, a conviction for which he was acquitted just a year later.
Prime minister three times, he had a record tenure in office in seven decades. However, more than for his political legacy, he will be remembered for the scandals he has been involved in and for his macho and controversial statements. Also because of his media power, as he owned several television channels and newspaper headlines.
In 2007 he announced the dissolution of his historic Forza Italia party and the birth of the People of Freedom coalition, but in 2013 he re-founded Forza Italia which he has chaired ever since.
FROM SCANDAL TO SCANDAL
In addition to the ‘Ruby’ case, for which he was convicted -and later acquitted-, some photos published by the newspaper El País in 2009 caused a real tsunami. The photos showed the orgies that he organized in Villa Certosa, his mansion in Sardinia. At that time he was in charge of the country and, although it did not cost him his job, it did precipitate the divorce from his second wife, Verónica Lario.
She was the one who accompanied him in many of his meetings with Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi was the only world leader to visit Crimea when Russia illegally annexed it. But Berlusconi, until his final days, boasted of the great friendship that united them: “I am one of his best friends,” he said on one occasion. In the middle of the Ukrainian war, the Italian came to boast of having received gifts from the Russian president for his birthday.
