Silvio Berlusconi is dead, but his cynical legacy of bluster and histrionics lives on

Silvio Berlusconi was determined to depart this life in the manner he had lived it, lavishly and flamboyantly, in the style of the pharaoh he believed himself to be. Or a Napoleon, whose statuettes he hoarded.

Back in the 1990s, in the grounds of his sumptuous villa in Arcore, near Milan, he commissioned local sculptor Pietro Cascella to build a giant underground mausoleum of white marble from the Apuan Alps. It comprises a flight of stairs leading through a narrow corridor decorated with things he might need in the afterlife – fruit, bread, keys, a mobile phone – to sliding stone door giving access to 37 graves for his dearest, his business cronies, and romantic partners. And a large white sarcophagus for Berlusconi himself.

It was illegal at the time for being “too close to human habitation”, but made partially lawful by his government in 2003. On Wednesday his cremated ashes were laid there after the state funeral, no doubt circumventing any residual prohibition on burials.

[ Silvio Berlusconi may be gone but Trump’s still here – the rotten populist legacy is everywhere ]

It was not the first time the law of the land was adjusted to suit the convenience of the billionaire who served three times and for nine years as prime minister. Berlusconi faced trial at least 36 times, on charges ranging from false accounting to bribing judges and paying a 17-year-old girl for sex. But he escaped several convictions after his government shortened the statute of limitations or otherwise changed the law.

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The only charge that stuck was a 2013 conviction for tax fraud, which saw him barred from office for six years, and doing community service with Alzheimer's patients instead of jail.

Donald Trump, a Berlusconi clone with the same chutzpah and morals but not the charm, was in court for only the first time this week, but is barely yet in the ha’penny place.

But, as with Trump’s longevity, and that of Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, as I wrote here two weeks ago, the bewildering question remains “how did this crook endear himself to voters so successfully?”

Berlusconi would profoundly change the shape of Italian politics, completely eclipsing the once powerful Christian Democrats, and opening the door to political high office to a succession of hardline right-wing, nationalist, populist, and even quasi-fascist leaders – the Northern League’s Matteo Salvini, the comic Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, and the Brothers of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, now prime minister, leading Italy’s most right-wing government since the second World War.

Anything but the mainstream: voters would try them all in turn.

Berlusconi’s rise was made possible by the fatigue that dysfunctional and stagnant Italian liberal-democracy had induced in voters – an endless succession of short governments, 68 since 1945, on average one every 13 months – as the dominant Christian Democrats hooked up with every single potential ally to keep out the mighty Italian Communist Party. A corruption scandal, Tagentopoli, in the early 1990s finally broke the camel’s back, discrediting the whole political system, and Berlusconi stepped in.

Everyone goes for the gazelles, and no one tries to win the warthogs, except for Berlusconi ... They’re housewives, they’re unemployed, they are peripheral people

Desperate for an alternative, voters seized on the illusion promised by the former cruise boat chanteur and billionaire business tycoon that he could offer a real alternative. He was the “successful” outsider and would rule by ignoring conventions and even the law for the sake of the little man. How familiar the model now seems.

As Giovanni Orsina, a professor of politics at Luiss University in Rome, also explains, “everyone goes for the gazelles, and no one tries to win the warthogs, except for Berlusconi ... And this has been Berlusconi’s major source of strength. It is a bloc that doesn’t have political culture, or has it but it’s not political. They’re housewives, they’re unemployed, they are peripheral people.”

Berlusconi embodied what Antonio Gramsci, albeit in a different context, described as the Italian people’s “taste for the operatic”. The bluster, the volume, the histrionics, the overblown rhetoric that are also the stuff of opera, all music to the ears of a jaded audience.

As journalist Jon Henley put it, “as long as politics is seen – sometimes with good reason – as a ‘big swamp’ (to cite Trumpist rhetoric) of corruption and hypocrisy, the cynical politics that Berlusconi pioneered, and rightwing populists perfected, will continue to triumph”.

Italy’s national system of proportional representation facilitated the emergence of new parties, as did the willingness of MPs to abandon the parties for which they were elected – of 945 deputies and senators elected in 2018, 322 had changed political affiliation by the end of May 2022.

His successors stepped into his shoes – Salvini on the back of a campaign for secession by the north, Grillo with his cynical curse on all politics, and Meloni, once part of Mussolini-admiring MSI, now remodelling herself as a centre-right democrat who has already pinched several of Berlusconi’s former ministers and is laying claim to his vote. Berlusconi might be dead but his legacy lives on.