Opinion Express View on Silvio Berlusconi: Il Cavaliere

Two decades before Donald Trump leapfrogged his way into the White House, another political outsider, using a similar formula of glamour, money and showmanship, became the Prime Minister of Italy. When he first won office in 1994, Silvio Berlusconi was a media magnate with no political experience. He had formed his party, Forza Italia, only the previous year. The advertising campaign he ran on his TV channels played its part in persuading Italian voters to give this maverick a chance to lead the country. They would do so three more times, until the 2011 Italian financial crisis finally eroded confidence in his leadership.

Few figures have played as central a role in post-war Italy’s making as Berlusconi, who died at the age of 86 this week. He was instrumental in transforming not only the political culture of the Mediterranean nation — marking the populist shift that, his critics argue, set the stage for the rise of the right-wing, including the party of current PM Giorgia Meloni — but also changing how Italy looked at itself. Filtered through Berlusconi’s flamboyant persona, Italy seemed more confident of its place. So what if there were the gaffes, such as pranking Angela Merkel at a summit in Trieste, or telling survivors of the 2009 earthquake in central Italy to look at living in emergency tents as “a weekend of camping”.

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But years of playing fast-and-loose with not just convention but also the law, caught up with Berlusconi. His handling of Italy’s debt crisis may have forced him out of office, but years of allegations of misconduct — bribing judges, tax fraud, paying underage girls for sex — played a part in taking the shine off. Towards the end of his life, he was no longer the dominating figure in a country whose politics had outpaced even the nimble Il Cavaliere.