When Silvio Berlusconi was elected Italy’s prime minister in 1994 few realised that Donald Trump’s warm up act had walked onto the world stage.
Trump’s ascent was more than two decades away, but Berlusconi was the promise of things to come: philanderer, fake tan, big tie, disdain, contempt and ridiculous hair, real estate developer and stratospheric career as a media mogul.
A man poses next to a poster of Silvio Berlusconi outside the former prime minister’s residence in Arcore, near Milan.Credit: AP
Berlusconi died aged 86 on Monday, just a day before Trump appeared in court on charges of keeping classified documents at his Palm Beach estate and obstructing government efforts to reclaim them. Together, they turned politics into burlesque.
Berlusconi cast himself as the bete noire of a declining and discredited political class. Accused of being as narcissistic, sexist and self-serving as the billionaire former US president, Berlusconi also played an equally piteous victim, railing against the judiciary and once claiming he was “the most persecuted person in the history of the world and the history of man”.
Loading
He served three terms over nine years until 2011, becoming Italy’s longest serving prime minister. He also defied court verdicts, attacked the press, ended the reign of facts over interpretation, trampled the line between big business and politics, staged infamous “bunga bunga” sex parties with sex workers and redefined the rules on political leadership. Furthermore, he was charged with paying a minor for sex, but the conviction was overturned thanks to Italy’s benevolent appellant process.
Although always playing to the local audience, Berlusconi shifted the way international politics was being played. The West’s alliances since 1945 had been a values-based approach to principles but Berlusconi ended all that, viewing Italy’s foreign policy through a narrow prism of self-interest, paving the way for Trump’s limited vision. Berlusconi was also a fan of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, asserted that Western civilisation was superior to Islam, described president-elect Barack Obama as “handsome, young and also suntanned” and was caught making ungallant remarks about then-German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Yet amid the gaffes, Italy hardly moved under his rule. In fact, he was tossed out in 2011 after failing to contain Italy’s sovereign debt and making his country the poorest in Europe.
But he foisted something much bigger than sovereign debt on the world. Despite the mockery and the bravado, his brand of shameless politics was to become a text for ambitious politicians around the globe, making him a precursor to contemporary populism that has seen the rise of the sovereign citizen ethos, the political strongman and the relentless attack on rules and precedent. It would be difficult to image how Trump, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Putin and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro would have fared without Berlusconi blazing the trail.