He is the longest-serving post war Prime Minister of Italy, and third longest-serving since the creation of Italy, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti. He held this position on three separate occasions: from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006 and currently since 2008. Technically, Berlusconi has been sworn in four times because after a cabinet reshuffle, as happened with Berlusconi in 2005, the new ministry is sworn in and subjected to a vote of confidence. He is the leader of the People of Freedom political movement, a centre-right party he founded in 2009. As of November 2009, he is the longest-serving current leader of a G8 country. As of 2011, Forbes magazine has ranked him as the 118th richest man in the world with a net worth of US$7.8 billion.
Berlusconi's political rise was rapid and surrounded by controversy. He was elected as a Member of Parliament for the first time and appointed as Prime Minister following the March 1994 parliamentary elections, when Forza Italia gained a relative majority a mere three months after having been officially launched. However, his cabinet collapsed after seven months, due to internal disagreements in his coalition. In the April 1996 snap parliamentary elections, Berlusconi ran for Prime Minister again but was defeated by centre-left candidate Romano Prodi. In the May 2001 parliamentary elections, he was again the centre-right candidate for Prime Minister and won against the centre-left candidate Francesco Rutelli. Berlusconi then formed his second and third cabinets, until 2006.
Berlusconi was leader of the centre-right coalition in the April 2006 parliamentary elections, which he lost by a very narrow margin, his opponent again being Romano Prodi. He was re-elected in the parliamentary elections of April 2008 following the collapse, on 24 January 2008, of Romano Prodi's government and sworn in as prime minister on 8 May 2008 (see also 2008 Italian political crisis).
Berlusconi has been criticised for his dominance over the Italian media.[citation needed] His broadcasting company Mediaset is the largest in the country and Berlusconi has never fulfilled his election promises to sell off his assets in the company to avoid a conflict of interest. His leadership has also been recently undermined by sex scandals.
In 2008, during his fourth campaign to become Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Meno male che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s about to erupt into carnality. The finale depicts a passionate young swimming instructor singing to a pool full of women in bathing suits: “Say it with the strength possessed only by those who have a pure mind: Presidente, we are with you!”
These days, you would have to possess an unusually pure mind to look at that pool full of young women without picturing the pool at Berlusconi’s estate, Arcore, just outside Milan. Along with the basement disco and the upstairs bedrooms, the pool is featured almost daily in Italian newspapers as one of the sites where the Presidente reportedly hosted scores of orgies—or, as they have become known around the world, Bunga Bungas. (There is heated debate about the origin of the term. Some say Berlusconi picked it up from Muammar Qaddafi—his friend, until recently. Others cite an off-color joke set in Africa.) The Bunga Bungas are a source of humiliation for many Italians, and of humor for others, including the Presidente, as Berlusconi is called. Not long ago, he told a convention of the Movement for National Responsibility, upon hearing its theme song, “My compliments on your anthem. I will use it as one of my songs for a Bunga Bunga!”
Berlusconi has always seemed pleased with himself. In 2006, he offered some advice to Italians living below the poverty line: “Do it my way and earn more money!” (His net worth is estimated at nine billion dollars.) He has described himself as “the best in the world—all the other world leaders wish they could be as good as I am.” Lately, however, his bravado has sounded increasingly misplaced. The Italian economy is stalled, and unemployment is at 8.4 per cent. In 2009, he was lambasted for his inadequate response to earthquakes in Abruzzo, which killed more than three hundred people and left seventy thousand homeless. Last July, Gianfranco Fini, the president of the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, who had been a crucial ally for sixteen years, broke away to form his own party. And then came Ruby.
This past fall, it was reported that the Prime Minister was under investigation for paying for sex with a teen-age belly dancer named Karima el Mahroug—better known by her stage name, Ruby Rubacuori, or Ruby Heartstealer—and that he had intervened on her behalf when she was arrested for stealing money from a roommate. Berlusconi claims that he never had sex with her and that, anyway, she told him she was twenty-four. He admits that he gave her thousands of euros at the end of her first evening at Arcore, and tens of thousands more later, but insists that these were innocent acts of generosity. He instructed the police to release her from custody, he says, because he thought that she was a niece of the former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and he wanted to avoid straining diplomatic relations. (Mahroug, who was born in Morocco and grew up in Sicily, is not related to Mubarak.) After the story broke, other women came forward to tell the stories of their Arcore nights. A twenty-seven-year-old prostitute named Nadia Macrì described Berlusconi lying in his bed, being serviced by women in rapid succession. “He would say, ‘Next one, please,’ and sometimes we were all together in the swimming pool, where sex took place.” Berlusconi denies Macrì’s account, and her credibility has been called into question. Macrì is the star of a new adult film called “Bunga Bunga 3D.”
Rubygate, as everyone calls the scandal, has grown progressively more lurid. Two of Berlusconi’s friends, Emilio Fede—the host of the television show “TG4,” which airs on one of the three networks Berlusconi owns—and the entertainment agent Dario (Lele) Mora, are charged with running a prostitution ring to meet the Prime Minister’s elaborate erotic expectations, with help from Nicole Minetti, a twenty-six-year-old former dental hygienist, showgirl, and, possibly, lover of Berlusconi’s. (All three have pleaded not guilty.) For months, the prosecutor’s office in Milan had been wiretapping phones used by Berlusconi and his associates, and the twenty thousand pages of documents pertaining to Rubygate have been leaking out in Italian newspapers. The picture that has emerged is of an aging emperor, surrounded by a harem of nubile women paid to ornament his dinner table, boost his ego, and dance around in their underpants. Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.
On the morning of April 6th, the opening day of Berlusconi’s trial for soliciting prostitution with a minor and for misuse of power, dozens of women gathered in front of the courthouse in Milan. They were not thanking God for Silvio’s existence. Several carried bouquets in the colors of the Italian flag and held up a large sign that read “Magistrates, don’t give in! We are with you!” Antonietta Bergamo, a housewife in her sixties, wore a hand-lettered placard that read “Dictators, prostitutes, drugs, tax evasion, Mafia, sex abuse—our Berlusconi doesn’t go without!” There were men among the protesters, too; one held up a sign with a picture of Hello Kitty, an emblem of Berlusconi’s underage paramours, above the words “I am a minor . . . Presidente Berlusconi, I am not your prop!
The sense that Berlusconi is just a natural man, one who happens to be exceptionally good at being male, has been an enormous part of his success. Throughout his career—as a singer on cruise ships, as a real-estate developer, as a media magnate, and, finally, as a politician—he has convinced Italians that he is someone they can both relate to and aspire to be like. Many men still feel that he is being attacked for being irresistible to women (which they would like to be) and plainly human, susceptible to sin (just like them). “He’s on the same wavelength as people,” one of Berlusconi’s friends told me. “He laughs when they laugh.”
Berlusconi has been far from contrite. A week before the opening of the Rubygate trial, he travelled to Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily where tens of thousands of North African refugees have come ashore in the past few months. He told the crowd assembled there, “Did you hear the latest poll? They asked women between twenty and thirty years old if they want to make love to Berlusconi. Thirty-three per cent said yes! Sixty-seven per cent said ‘Again?’ ”
The more pertinent number concerning Berlusconi and women is his approval rating among female Italians, which has fallen to twenty-seven per cent—down from forty-eight per cent just a year ago. “But they pardon,” Fedele Confalonieri, an old friend of the Prime Minister’s and the chairman of Mediaset, one of his companies, said on a recent morning, in his elegant office in Milan. “They forgive him about that, because, how can we say? He’s natural.” Confalonieri is a bald man with rheumy blue eyes, a dignified manner, and a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and opera. (He was until 2005 the president of the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala.)
Confalonieri asserted that Berlusconi has the utmost respect for women, and that he has been tremendously popular with them ever since the two men became friends, as sixteen-year-olds, in Milan. They were in a band together, and at one point Confalonieri kicked Berlusconi out, “because of women,” he said, meaning that Berlusconi always got the girls. “He was very handsome. Now he’s a little—how can you say?—dilapidated. Like a building.” Confalonieri laughed. “He was a very good sort of crooner: Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, this kind, and also French songs, Yves Montand. He liked to go and dance with the girls.” Confalonieri was with Berlusconi when, in 1980, he met Veronica Lario, who became his second wife. (At the time, he was still married to Carla Dall’Oglio, with whom he had two children.) Confalonieri remembers it as “a very beautiful story.” Lario, an actress, was performing in a play at a theatre that Berlusconi owned. “She played ‘Le Cocu Magnifique,’ by a Belgian writer. I remember there was a scene where she—” Confalonieri mimed opening his shirt. “And she had very beautiful ones,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “Very beautiful tits. And he fell in love.”
The day before the Rubygate trial began, there was a debate in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian parliament, about whether the Milan court had the authority to try the case, when, as Berlusconi’s lawyers argue, he was acting as the head of state to avert a diplomatic incident with Egypt. The chamber meets in a cavernous room with velvet curtains and a musty scent. Under a stained-glass ceiling, Berlusconi’s former ally Gianfranco Fini, the president of the chamber, sat on a dais facing the deputies, who are seated from right to left according to their position on the political spectrum. Antonio di Pietro—who was a prominent prosecutor in the Clean Hands trials and is now a deputy from the anti-Berlusconi Italy of Values Party—rose to address the room. “The world burns with real problems,” he said. “There’s an ongoing war in which we are participating. . . . Today, Italians need to know that in parliament . . . we are trying to establish if Ruby Rubacuori is Mubarak’s niece!”
There was light applause from his side of the chamber, and grumbling from across the room, where Berlusconi’s center-right coalition sits. But many of the deputies seemed hardly to be paying attention. (This is not unusual. A few weeks ago, a photographer in the press balcony caught a deputy browsing an escort agency’s Web site on his iPad during a debate.) Because Berlusconi’s coalition has the majority in parliament, the vote was all but ceremonial. Antonio Leone, a member of the P.D.L., said, “We have to vote, and even the opposition is going to vote, but the outcome is obvious.” The P.D.L. won, which meant that the Supreme Court would rule on whether the lower court had jurisdiction. In the meantime, the Ruby trial would proceed.
It’s difficult to imagine how prosecutors will prove that Berlusconi and Mahroug had sex when both say that they didn’t, but the court may be able to convict members of Berlusconi’s inner circle for abetting prostitution. There is little question that Berlusconi gave considerable amounts of money to Nicole Minetti, Lele Mora, and Emilio Fede, the people accused of procuring women for him. Prosecutors have records of Berlusconi’s accountant wiring money to them. But Berlusconi has given many of his friends staggering cash gifts; Fedele Confalonieri has received millions, in addition to his salary and bonuses. And there is no question at all that many of the women who attend Berlusconi’s parties are barely legal and barely dressed, and leave with gifts of jewelry or even cars. (Berlusconi prefers to give away subcompacts, mostly Smart Cars and Mini Coopers.) But it’s anyone’s guess how many of these young women flirted with Berlusconi, and how many of them actually slept with him—and, if they did so, whether it was because they were prostitutes, or because they were young women who wanted the bragging rights, and the access to a fabulous world of private planes and sunbathing in Sardinia, that come with bedding the Prime Minister of Italy. To some extent, what is on trial in Rubygate is not just Berlusconi’s abuse of power but also his decisions about the people with whom he surrounds himself.
One afternoon, Nicole Minetti and her lawyer, Daria Pesce, an aggressive woman in her sixties with hair bleached the color of bananas, were discussing what makes Berlusconi attractive to women. “He’s a fascinating man,” Minetti said.
“Very smart,” Pesce said, nodding.
“Very charming,” Minetti added. “There aren’t many men like that.”
“And powerful!” Pesce said.
Minetti was sitting at a table in Pesce’s office, in Milan, with her roommate, Luca Pedrini, an aspiring publicist. (Minetti is his first client.) She was on her way to the gym, wearing spandex leggings and a tight white T-shirt. On the table, near Pesce’s cigarettes, was a black Hermès Birkin bag that Minetti was given by a financier who was her boyfriend before the scandal broke. The two have now separated. “We’re in between, because all this has been really a big stress,” Minetti said, brushing a strand of silky hair off her face. “You can imagine how hard it is for a man to hear about all this.” Minetti has been so besieged that she fantasizes about leaving the country; she loves New York City, which she visited for the first time last Christmas. “I loved the sales in December!” she said. “I went to Barneys, I went to Bergdorf, and Saks. I bought three Juicy Couture sweat suits.”
Minetti first met Silvio Berlusconi two years ago, when she was studying at the San Raffaele Hospital, in Milan, where the Prime Minister was having dermatological treatments. “I told him that I’d always wanted to do politics when I was younger, and he said, ‘That’s great, because we don’t have many women in politics, obviously.’ ” They exchanged phone numbers, and he told her, “I’ll get back to you if you’re really interested.”
Jokes, gestures and blunders
Berlusconi with the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Berlusconi has developed a reputation for making gaffes or insensitive remarks.
On 2 July 2003, Berlusconi suggested that German SPD MEP Martin Schulz, who had criticised his domestic policies, should play a Nazi concentration camp guard in a film. Berlusconi insisted that he was joking, but accused Schulz and others to be "bad-willing tourists of democracy". This incident caused a brief cooling of Italy's relationship with Germany.
Addressing traders at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2003, Berlusconi listed a series of reasons to invest in Italy, the first of which was that "we have the most beautiful secretaries in the world". This remark resulted in uproar in Italy where female members of parliament took part in a one-day cross-party protest. Berlusconi's list also included the claim that Italy had "fewer communists, and those who are still here deny having been one".
In 2003, during an interview with Nicholas Farrell, then editor of The Spectator magazine, Berlusconi claimed that Mussolini "had been a benign dictator who did not murder opponents but sent them 'on holiday'".
Kotipizza Pizza Berlusconi.
Berlusconi had made disparaging remarks about Finnish cuisine during negotiations to decide on the location of the European Food Safety Authority in 2001. He caused further offence in 2005, when he claimed that during the negotiations he had had to "dust off his playboy charms" in order to persuade the Finnish president, Tarja Halonen, to concede that the EFSA should be based in Parma instead of Finland, and compared Finnish smoked reindeer unfavourably to culatello. The Italian ambassador in Helsinki was summoned by the Finnish foreign minister. One of Berlusconi's ministers later 'explained' the comment by saying that "anyone who had seen a picture of Halonen must have been aware that he had been joking". Halonen took the incident in good humour, retorting that Berlusconi had "overestimated his persuasion skills".The Finnish pizza chain Kotipizza responded by launching a variety of pizza called Pizza Berlusconi, using smoked reindeer as the topping. The pizza won first prize in America's Plate International pizza contest in March 2008.
In March 2006, Berlusconi alleged that Chinese communists under Mao Zedong had "boiled [children] to fertilise the fields". His opponent Romano Prodi criticised Berlusconi for offending the Chinese people and called his comments 'unthinkable'. Berlusconi replied by gifting 1000 copies of the Black Book of Communism during one of his election rallies.
In the run-up to the 2008 Italian general election, Berlusconi was angrily accused of sexism for saying that female politicians from the right were "more beautiful" and that "the left has no taste, even when it comes to women". In 2008 Berlusconi criticised the composition of the Council of Ministers of the Spanish Government as being too 'pink' by virtue of the fact that it has (once the President of the Council, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is counted) an equal number of men and women. He also stated that he doubted that such a composition would be possible in Italy given the "prevalence of men" in Italian politics.
Also in 2008 Berlusconi caused controversy at a joint press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin. When a Russian journalist asked a question about Mr Putin's personal relationships, Berlusconi made a gesture towards the journalist imitating a gunman shooting.
On 6 November 2008, two days after Barack Obama was elected the first Black US President, Berlusconi referred to Obama as "young, handsome and even tanned": On 26 March 2009 he said "I'm paler [than Mr Obama], because it's been so long since I went sunbathing. He's more handsome, younger and taller."
Subsequently, at a tent camp on the outskirts of L'Aquila housing some of the more than 30,000 people who lost their homes during the 2009 earthquake he said to an African priest: "you have a nice tan."
On 24 January 2009, Berlusconi announced his aim to enhance the numbers of military patrolling the Italian cities from 3000 to 30000 in order to crack down on what he called an "evil army" of criminals. Responding to a female journalist who asked him if this tenfold increase in patrolling soldiers would be enough to secure Italian women from being raped, he said:
We could not field a big enough force to avoid this risk [of rape]. We would need as many soldiers as beautiful women and I don't think that would be possible, because our women are so beautiful.
Opposition leaders called the remarks insensitive and in bad taste. Berlusconi retorted that he had merely wanted to compliment Italian women. Other critics accused him of creating a "police state".
On 3 April 2009, Berlusconi appeared to have annoyed Queen Elizabeth II at a photo session during the G20 summit. During the photo session, Berlusconi shouted "Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama", prompting her to turn around and chastise Berlusconi, “What is it? Why does he have to shout?”. The following day, at the NATO meeting in Kehl, Berlusconi was seen talking on his mobile phone, while Merkel and other NATO leaders waited for him for a photo on a Rhine bridge. (Afterwards, Berlusconi claimed he was talking to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about accepting the Secretary Generalship of Anders Fogh Rasmussen). Responding to the Italian media's reaction to these incidents, he said he was considering "hard measures" against reporters, and referred to some of their claims as "slander".
Two days after the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake, Berlusconi suggested that people left homeless should view their experience as a camping weekend. While touring the earthquake site, he asked councillor Lia Beltrami, "Can I fondle you?".
In May 2009, Berlusconi alleged that he had once had to travel three hours to see a two hundred year old church in the Finnish countryside which, in his opinion, would have been demolished if it was in Italy. Berlusconi had made a non-official visit to Finland in 1999 and had never seen any Finnish church, but had just been visiting Iceland.
In October 2010, Berlusconi was chastised by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano after he was filmed telling "offensive and deplorable jokes", including one whose punchline was similar to one of the gravest blasphemies in the Italian language. It was also revealed he had made another anti-Semitic joke a few days previously. Berlusconi responded to the allegations by saying the jokes were "neither an offence nor a sin, but merely a laugh".
On 1 November 2010, after once again being accused of involvement in juvenile prostitution, he suggested that an audience at the Milan trade fair should stop reading newspapers: "Don't read newspapers any more because they deceive you. I am a man who works hard all day long and if sometimes I use to look at some well-looking girl, it's better to be fond of pretty girls than to be gay".The remarks were immediately condemned by Arcigay, Italy's main gay rights organization, on behalf of both women and gay people; speaking on behalf of the organization, its president Paolo Patanè said that it was "unacceptable for a head of government to foster a chauvinistic and vulgar attitude" with such a statement, and requested that Berlusconi apologize. Politicians including Nichi Vendola, Antonio Di Pietro, and Franco Grillini released similar statements, with the latter commenting that it was "better to be gay than to be a sex-addicted schemer like Berlusconi." Flavia Madaschi, president of Agedo, the Italian equivalent of PFLAG, also commented that it was "better to be gay than Berlusconi. Activists staged an anti-homophobia protest outside Palazzo Chigi.
On 13 July 2011, according to a leaked telephone surveillance transcript, Berlusconi told his presumed blackmailer Valter Lavitola: "The only thing they can say about me is that I screw around Now they're spying on me, controlling my phone calls. I don't give a fuck. In a few months I'll be leaving this shit country that makes me sick." He had already made a comment about sending a postcard from the Bahamas in 2005.
Assault at rally
On 13 December 2009 Berlusconi was hit in the face with an alabaster statuette of Milan Cathedral after a rally in Milan's Piazza del Duomo. As Berlusconi was shaking hands with the public, a man in the crowd stepped forward and launched the statuette at him. The attack was never captured on film. The assailant was subsequently detained and identified as Massimo Tartaglia, a 42 year-old surveyor with a history of mental illness but no criminal record, living in the outskirts of Milan. According to a letter released to the Italian news agency ANSA, Tartaglia has apologised for the attack, writing: "I don't recognise myself", and adding that he had "acted alone with no form of militancy or political affiliation". Berlusconi suffered facial injuries, a broken nose and two broken teeth; he was subsequently hospitalised. Italian president Giorgio Napolitano and politicians from all parties in Italy condemned the attack.
In the night of 15–16 December a 26-year old man was stopped by police and Berlusconi's bodyguards while trying to gain access to Berlusconi's hospital room. A search revealed that he carried no weapons, although three hockey sticks and two knives were later found in his car. The suspect was known to have a history of mental illness and mandatory treatment in mental institutions.
Berlusconi was discharged from the hospital on 17 December 2009.
All about: Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, David Cameron. Silvio Berlusconi, Jean-Claude Juncker
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