Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italian public life for three decades as a media tycoon, football club owner and four-time prime minister. He also became one of the most scandal-plagued leaders in modern European history, a man ultimately convicted of tax fraud and dogged for years by trials, sex scandals and accusations of corruption. When he died in June 2023 at the age of 86, he left behind a record of extraordinary influence inseparable from a long trail of wrongdoing.
Building an Empire
Born in Milan in 1936, Berlusconi made his fortune first in construction and then in media, assembling a business empire anchored by the Fininvest holding company and the Mediaset television group, which came to dominate Italian commercial broadcasting. He also bought the AC Milan football club, which under his ownership became one of the dominant teams in European football, collecting Italian league titles and European trophies and turning Berlusconi into a national celebrity. Known to Italians as “Il Cavaliere,” he cut a flamboyant figure, and his control of much of Italy’s private television gave him a platform, and a source of influence, that no rival could match.
Long before politics, he had worked his way up from modest beginnings, reportedly even performing as a singer on cruise ships in his youth before making his first fortune in real estate development around Milan.
The Political Machine
In 1994 Berlusconi entered politics, founding the Forza Italia party and sweeping into the prime minister’s office. Over the following years he served as prime minister across several terms, in 1994, from 2001 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2011, making him one of the longest-serving leaders of postwar Italy. His tenure was marked by a persistent conflict of interest between his political power and his vast media holdings, which critics said he never meaningfully separated. He resigned in 2011 as Italy was engulfed by a sovereign debt crisis and his governing coalition crumbled.
Convictions and Scandals
Berlusconi’s career was inseparable from the courtroom. In 2013 he was definitively convicted of tax fraud in a case involving his Mediaset business, a conviction that barred him from holding public office and resulted in a sentence he served through community service. This was not a technicality or an allegation; it was a final conviction for cheating the state.
He was also at the center of the notorious “bunga bunga” scandal, which exposed lurid private parties and led to charges that he had paid for sex with an underage woman, in the case widely known by the name Ruby, and that he had abused the powers of his office to cover it up. He was convicted at first instance in that case but later acquitted on appeal in 2014. Over the years he faced a long series of other legal proceedings, some ending in acquittal, others expiring under statutes of limitation. The cumulative picture was of a leader who spent much of his time in power fighting the law.
A Contested Legacy
Berlusconi never fully retreated from public life. His tax-fraud conviction triggered a ban that cost him his Senate seat and barred him from office for several years, yet he remained the leader of Forza Italia and a persistent force in Italian politics. Once the ban lapsed, he engineered a return to elected office, winning a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, a comeback that captured his refusal to be sidelined despite everything on his record.
To his supporters he was a self-made entrepreneur and a charismatic showman who reshaped Italian politics. To his critics he was the embodiment of the corrosion of public standards, a man who used private wealth and media power to serve his own interests and skirt accountability.
He died on 12 June 2023. The plain facts of his record, a tax-fraud conviction, a career shadowed by sex scandals and corruption allegations, and repeated collisions with the justice system, sit alongside his undeniable political success. Both are part of the story, and neither can be erased from it.
