Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi built a television monopoly, entered politics to protect it, and was prime minister of Italy three times across two decades. He began as a property developer in Milan, singing on cruise ships to pay his way through law school, and built Milano 2, a suburb wired for cable. From that he assembled the private networks that broke the state broadcaster's monopoly, protected by a decree from his friend the prime minister Bettino Craxi. He also owned AC Milan, the country's largest publisher, and a great deal else. When the Mani Pulite corruption investigations destroyed the entire postwar party system in 1992 and 1993, he founded Forza Italia in three months, named it after a football chant, and won the 1994 election. His three governments were the longest-lasting of the republic and passed a series of laws that shortened statutes of limitations and decriminalised false accounting while he was under investigation. He faced more than thirty trials, was convicted of tax fraud in 2013 and expelled from the Senate, and was acquitted or timed out of the rest. He resigned in 2011 during the sovereign debt crisis with Italian bond spreads at record levels. He is generally regarded as the template for a politics of media ownership and personal brand that spread well beyond Italy. He returned as a member of the European Parliament and then the Senate, and was still leading his party when he died in 2023. Italy held a state funeral with a day of national mourning, which was itself argued about. Whatever else he was, he is the reason Italian politics stopped being conducted through parties and started being conducted through personalities and television.

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