Silvio Berlusconi, Italy leader mired in scandal, dies at 86
(TNS) — Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant media mogul whose reign as Italy’s longest-serving postwar prime minister was plagued by sex scandals and allegations of corruption, has died. He was 86. Berlusconi was hospitalized in Milan on Friday just three weeks after being released from a previous treatment. He had a history of heart ailments, including a malfunctioning valve that surgeons replaced in 2016, and was hospitalized for a lung infection in 2020 after contracting Covid-19. This year he had spent six weeks in hospital to treat a pulmonary infection linked to chronic leukemia.
The former premier died on Monday morning, Alessandro Cattaneo, deputy coordinator of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, said on the RaiNews24 television channel.
Berlusconi was one of the most influential figures in Italian politics of the last three decades. He built a television empire in the 1980s before deploying his showmanship and talent for catchy sound bites to win three national elections. He served more than nine years as prime minister, leading four different cabinets, an unprecedented tenure in a country plagued by revolving-door governments. He also played kingmaker in bringing center-right coalitions to power, even when his party was no longer the dominant force. Berlusconi faced a string of judicial proceedings yet faced only one conviction, in a tax fraud case that saw him lose his parliamentary seat, though only temporarily.
Despite his wealth — his fortune was estimated at $7.4 billion as of April 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — Berlusconi cast himself as a man of the people, an outsider challenging a discredited ruling class with a promise of national renewal. His style and rhetoric were similar to “the rallies of a military leader, a politician, an athletic coach, but most of all they resembled talks of an American self-help guru,” Alexander Stille wrote in his 2006 biography of Berlusconi, The Sack of Rome. Many voters identified with Berlusconi, convinced that his success story would rub off on them.
