For all of Silvio Berlusconi’s ups and downs, triumphs and bankruptcies, scandals and achievements, crashes and comebacks, one politician’s life is hardly enough. He was a tearjerker on a cruise ship, real estate and media tycoon, football official, party founder, prime minister, convicted tax fraudster and, despite all the scandal and faux pas, a hero to some Italians to the end. “I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” Berlusconi once said of himself in 2006. Many simply saw him as the prototype of a populist. Former Prime Minister and EU Commissioner Mario Monti once called Berlusconi the “father of all populists”.
Watch the video: Silvio Berlusconi dies at the age of 86.
The “father of all populists”: Silvio Berlusconi led a life between successes and scandals
He was always laughed at and ridiculed abroad, but he couldn’t be beaten at home. “Berlusconism” – his political appearance had its own name. With a mixture of opportunism, audacity, machismo, but also a feeling for moods in the country and the great influence of his TV stations, the law graduate and self-made billionaire rose to the top.
Berlusconi has been head of government four times, spending a total of more than nine years in the Palazzo Chigi – no other prime minister in the Italian republic has been prime minister since 1946. With a number of scandals and legal proceedings, however, he soiled his own political legacy. Above all, the so-called Bunga-Bunga affair involving parties with women, some of whom were underage, in his private villa will always be associated with the politician, known as the “Cavaliere” (knight), in the memories of Italians and abroad.
No one else has shaped and changed Italy for decades like the vain, egocentric and often embarrassing man from Milan. Berlusconi died on Monday in a Milan hospital at the age of 86.