Opinion: Before Trump or Viktor Orban, there was Italy’s Berlusconi

Editor’s note: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” She publishes the newsletter Lucid on threats to democracy. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

“I’m the most persecuted man in all of history,” then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi claimed in 2009, just after Italy’s constitutional court stripped him of immunity from prosecution, leaving him vulnerable as he faced yet another corruption trial.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat - CNN

It was another round of the clash between the Italian government and Berlusconi, whose trials and judicial entanglements were so numerous as to merit their own Wikipedia page.

Berlusconi, the three-time Italian prime minister who died this week at 86, wrote the script for an authoritarian style of leadership within a democracy.

The flamboyant billionaire owner of a business, media and sports empire, Berlusconi privatized Italian television in the 1980s. His ownership of commercial television networks gave him more influence over the formation of public opinion than any Italian leader since Benito Mussolini — and established his personality cult as well.

Often underestimated due to his boorish behavior, Berlusconi exerted strict control over his party, Forza Italia, and brought the far right into government for the first time since 1945 — partnering with the neo-fascist National Alliance party (formerly the Italian Social Movement) as well as the xenophobic Northern League in all three of his coalition governments (1994, 2001-2006, 2008-2011).

He also had a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and promoted Russian agendas forcefully abroad.

The fear factor 

Born in Milan in 1936, Berlusconi first made his name as the larger-than-life owner of a business and media empire and the AC Milan soccer team.

Italian television had been limited to three state-owned RAI national networks, but by the 1980s Berlusconi’s Mediaset conglomerate owned the three largest private channels.

Berlusconi was known as an Italian success story — but also for taking risks that often landed him at odds with the law.

Indeed, Marcello Dell’Utri, who ran Berlusconi’s advertising firm Publitalia, continued to serve as a senator in Berlusconi’s party after he was convicted of Mafia association in 2004. 

AC Milan president Silvio Berlusconi is carried by Milan players after winning the 1988 Italian championship at Milan's San Siro stadium, Italy. - Ferdinando Meazza/AP/FILE

In the political arena, Berlusconi and his extremist partners beat the drum of communist threat to stoke fear in voters, playing on nostalgia for fascism’s “law and order” while whitewashing its violence.

No matter that at the time of his entry into politics in 1994, communism had recently collapsed on the continent and the Italian Communist Party, previously the largest such party in Western Europe, had been dissolved.

“Mussolini never murdered anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them,” Berlusconi told British newsmagazine The Spectator in 2003, referring to dank fascist prisons on islands like Ponza where torture had been practiced.

Berlusconi also raised fears in Italians about the loss of “tradition,” using the specter of Italian demographic decline to justify anti-immigrant policies that preceded those of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other far-right leaders.

After winning Italy’s general election in 2008, he called undocumented immigrants ”an army of evil” and their presence in Italy “a national emergency.” 

The media mogul 

Such talking points had traction because Berlusconi controlled a large majority of the private broadcast media audience and television ad revenues.

This also allowed him to set the narrative about his own legal woes and make sure his cult of victimhood at the hands of prosecutors was continually refreshed.

In 2003, facing the charge that his holding company Fininvest had paid a 500 million Euro bribe to a Roman judge in 1991, Berlusconi announced he was a target of a “witch hunt” and “an incredible judicial persecution.”

Then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi smiles with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a joint press conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, in 2003. - Sergei Chirikov/AFP/Getty Images

In the meantime, he championed dozens of ad personam laws to protect himself from prosecution, allowing him to repeatedly escape conviction for past actions and used delaying tactics to run out the clock on new ones.

He left office in 2011, having been forced to resign due to the Eurozone crisis, and over the years faced dozens of court battles — with one definitive conviction for tax fraud, false accounting and embezzlement.

The personality cult 

It is a testament to the power of Berlusconi’s personality cult and media machine that his resignation did not initially lose him his core voters. Rather, as has been the case with former US President Donald Trump through two impeachments and a federal indictment, this reversal of fortune reinforced his supporters’ loyalty to him by playing into his cult of victimhood.

When Forza Italia was revived as a party for the 2013 elections, it lost to the center-left by less than 1%. It took a five-year ban on running for office, decreed as part of his conviction later that year for tax fraud, along with other charges of sex with a minor, wiretapping and bribery, to deflate his personality cult and the power of his party.

“I am the most democratic man ever to be Prime Minister of Italy,” Berlusconi asserted as he bent the legal and other institutions of the Italian republic to suit his private needs.

But his time in power is also a story of the resilience of democracy and the importance of prosecuting those who believe they are above the law.

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