Growing up with Berlusconi: How Italy’s former PM seduced a generation

Maltese born in the 1960s and 1970s, grew up watching entertainment staples on TV like Drive In, Striscia la Notizia, Amici, Non e la Rai and the Maurizio Costanzo Show.

They were screened on Mediaset, the private media empire founded by Silvio Berlusconi.

Silvio Berlusconi addressing the crowd in 1994

Berlusconi was the pioneer of a new kind of TV; one which was advert driven and tabloidish, in which celebrity gossip and scantily dressed female dancers took centre stage.

In 1994, this provided Berlusconi with the perfect vehicle to launch Forza Italia, which went on to win national elections a few months later, thanks to catchy tunes and slogans promising a “governo del fare” (a government of doers).

Yet before he seduced a nation with his contagious optimism, he had already transformed millions of TV screens in family living rooms into virtual gentlemen’s clubs in which pole dancers flaunted their curves in peak time hours during game shows.

Presenters Ezio Greggio and Enzo Iacchetti flanked by the ‘veline’ on television show Striscia La Notizia

This was not an easy feat considering that until the mid 1980s it was illegal in Italy for private TV stations to transmit nationally. Berlusconi managed to circumvent the ban by acquiring several local and regional channels, on which he broadcast the same schedule of programmes simultaneously.

His money attracted seasoned TV presenters like Mike Bongiorno and producers like Antonio Ricci, the producer of satirical shows Drive In and Striscia la Notizia, which gave Mediaset an edge over the more serious, intellectual and austere public broadcaster RAI.

Holy trinity: Real estate, TV and football

Berlusconi’s success is interlinked to his self-projection as a man of the people who offered an entertainment schedule which was in synch with national popular aspirations.

This image was reinforced by his acquisition of AC Milan in 1986, which he transformed from a struggling outfit into a star-studded dream team which included Dutch superstars like Ruud Gullit, Marco Van Basten and Frank Rijkaard.

It was Berlusconi’s success in real estate, football and TV which shaped the dreams of millions of Italians in a decade marked by rampant consumerism made possible by rapid economic growth.

Yet the 1980s were also marked by widespread corruption, the extent of which was only exposed in 1992 when the tangentopoli scandal was uncovered by a pool of magistrates in Milan who embarked on Operazione Mani Pulite (Operation Clean Hands).

Silvio Berlusconi with his AC Milan team which in 2007 won the Champions League

It was an operation which left businessmen like Berlusconi politically orphaned.

For Berlusconi’s rise to the top was also a result of his hobnobbing with powerful political networks like Propaganda 2 (P2), a masonic lodge founded by the neo fascist Licio Gelli, whose clandestine plan was to take over the country’s institutions to thwart the prospect of a democratically elected communist government.

But Berlusconi also courted mainstream politicians like the socialist Bettino Craxi whose backing was essential in securing a TV licence for Berlusconi’s media empire.

Berlusconi’s success was also rooted in his sprawling real estate empire in Milan whose expansion also attracted the prying eyes of the judiciary which had started looking for possible infiltration of mafia money in the rich north.

How to create a new party and win an election in one year

Yet it was only after tangentopoli had wiped out the traditional parties led by the politicians that he had befriended over the previous decades, that Berlusconi, decided to enter the political fray.

In 1994, Berlusconi used all his business acumen and his experience in the media and the football world, to create a new party whose name Forza Italia evoked the love for the national team.

He did so by flooding the airwaves he owned with adverts. In so doing he accomplished his mission; that of stopping the former communists and their allies from filling the vacuum left by the centrist parties ravished by the ‘bribesville’ scandal.

Mediaset Offices

But his success was only made possible by co-opting two far right parties, the separatist Lega Nord and the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, making Italy the second country in Europe after Austria to break the post WWII taboo of including the far right in national governments.

Berlusconi deserves some credit for taming the radicalism of his allies, as the Lega Nord gradually renounced its separatist roots, and Gianfranco Fini repudiated fascism as an ‘absolute evil’ during a visit to Israel in 2003.

Yet this was never a clear-cut process, with the far right finding a new raison d’etre in its crusade against irregular migration.

Silvio Berlusconi addresses a rally in Rome, Saturday, 19 October, 2019

This shift to the right also left a strain on friendly relations with Malta which during the third Berlusconi administration found itself bullied by home affairs minister Roberto Maroni, who repeatedly refused to rescue migrants in closer vicinity to Lampedusa.

And in a case of reaping what he sowed, Berlusconi ended up losing his hegemony over the Italian right wing when Forza Italia was first overtaken by Salvini’s Lega in 2018 and subsequently by Meloni’s Fratelli d’ Italia in 2022.

The obsession with the red togas

Yet what distinguished Berlusconi’s terms in government was his eternal clash with the judiciary whom he derided as ‘toghe rosse’ (red judges).

His 30-yearlong feud with the judiciary started in the most spectacular way when he was served with a notice that he was  being investigated for bribes paid to tax inspectors, while presiding a G8 summit in Naples just months after winning elections. Berlusconi was furious at being humiliated in front of the world and spent the next decades fighting the judiciary.

Despite facing many trials, Berlusconi was to be convicted only in one case involving tax evasion to the tune of €7.3 million through illicit trade of movie rights between secret fictitious companies in the mid-1990s. This earned him an exclusion from public office and a four-year prison sentence, three of which were covered by a pardon. Given his venerable age, the former prime minister was able to complete his sentence as community service from 2014 to 2015.

Silvio Berlusconi addresses court in 2003 on corruption charges linked to his media company

But in six other cases Berlusconi was only spared thanks to laws passed by his majority in parliament shortening the time limit for prosecution of various offences and making false accounting illegal only if there is a specific damaged party reporting the fact to the authorities.

These laws known as ‘leggi ad personam’, ultimately exposed the travesty of a politician changing the legal goal posts simply to protect himself from justice.    

But the most sensational and damaging case saw Berlusconi accused of paying an under-age dancer called Karima El Mahroug, known as Ruby the Heartstealer, for sex. Berlusconi was initially condemned to seven years in jail, but the verdict was overturned in 2014 by an appeals court which ruled there was no proof he had known that she was 17 at the time of the encounter.

Ultimately despite promising to modernise Italy and for a time presenting himself as a liberal reformer Berlusconi left little behind him in terms of durable reforms, with most of his time in office wasted in fighting accusations of impropriety.

He was also constantly in debt to his right-wing allies who demanded their pound of flesh in return for shielding him from judicial probes. To keep them in his fold he became an unlikely champion of ultra conservative values.

He also appealed to macho and homophobic instincts. In 2011 when faced with a media onslaught related to the ‘bunga bunga’ parties he replied’ “I have a gruelling work schedule and if I happen to look pretty girls in the face now and then, well then, it’s better to be a fan of pretty women than to be gay.”

Maltese parallels

Yet Berlusconi thrived in the polarisation he provoked, serving as the country’s prime minister from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006 and from 2008 to 2011. His electoral success despite constant scandals involving himself and close allies like Marcello Del Utri, found guilty of complicity with the Sicilian Casa Nostra, evokes similarities with Labour’s enduring popularity in Malta.

Another similarity lies in the persecution complex which characterised both Berlusconi’s claim that he was “the Jesus Christ of Italian politics” and the victim of a conspiracy involving politically motivated judges  and the deep state and  Muscat’s recent claim that ‘free masons’ and the ‘establishment’ are to blame for the accusations levelled against him.

Yet the obsession of Berlusconi’s opponents with seeing him rot in jail also partly explains his success.  This also precluded a focus by the Opposition on everyday life problems and solutions. This too evokes parallels with the Nationalist Opposition in Malta.

Curiously, despite the obvious parallels with Muscat, Berlusconi was still revered by local centre right politicians like David Casa who despite being at the forefront of the battle for the rule of law in Malta, had nothing but praise for Berlusconi’s legacy.

But there is an important distinction between Malta and Italy. While in Italy Berlusconi felt a need to contest elections to protect his interests, no such imperative is felt by the Maltese business class whose interests are well taken care for by the established parties.

Moreover, none of the current crop of Maltese businessmen display the kind of charisma and acumen which made Berlusconi such a successful politician.

Berlusconi’s Trumpian legacy

While it is hard to pinpoint a permanent long-lasting achievement by Berlusconi in terms of his country’s modernisation, he was ahead of his time in terms of approach and style.

He will go down in history as a precursor of a new kind of right wing populism. His brand of anti-establishment politics, off the cuff remarks and intentional gaffs,  his flirtation with the far right and his diatribes against the judiciary preceded similar traits exhibited by  Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in more recent times. Like Berlusconi, Trump also managed to reconcile his reputation as a womanizer with a defence of conservative values. And like his Italian counterpart Trump also presents himself as the persecuted victim of hostile judicial forces.

Berlusconi’s forced resignation from office in 2011 and the substitution of his democratically elected government by a technocratic government led by economist Mario Monti, also left a bitter aftertaste which fed the narrative of the Eurosceptic right-wing not just in Italy but also in other European countries.  But in this aspect Berlusconi did not cross the line as Trump did in 2021 by inciting riots in Capitol Hill after he was democratically deposed from office.

In a twist of irony, Berlusconi who often invoked the red menace to galvanise his voters could not even end his bromance with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin after the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Months into the invasion he even thanked Putin for sending him “20 bottles of vodka and a very sweet letter” for his birthday.

Subsequently he went as far as blaming Ukranian lPresident Volodymyr Zelensky for the war arguing that “all he had to do was to stop attacking the two autonomous republics of the Donbas and this would not have happened.”

Perhaps his sympathy for Putin was rooted in his soft spot for autocrats who could rise above the law, something which the pesky judges had prevented him from doing in Italy.