Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Forza Italia dies at the age of 86

Is dead Silvio Berlusconi. She was 86 years old. He left this morning at 9.30 at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, where his brother arrived shortly after, Paul Berlusconi, and shortly after the children aboard different cars Marina, Eleonora, Barbara and Pier Silvio. The values ​​dthe leader of Forza Italia, hospitalized since last Friday for tests related to chronic myelomonocytic leukemia from which he had been suffering for some time, showed no signs of improving. Then the situation escalated.

It is now difficult to imagine an Italy without them Silvio Berlusconthe, the Arcitaliano par excellence, an existence as an absolute star performer. In the last fifty years there hasn’t been a day in which his name hasn’t been mentioned, on TV, in the newspapers, in Parliament, in bars, at the stadium; “il Berlusca” has split public opinion like an apple. Building contractor, television tycoon, president of Milan and then of Monza, founder of a party called Forza Italia, three times prime minister, defendant in sensational trials. Everything about him was excessive, the son of excess. At one point his popularity was such as to be identified, in the world, with the Italian tout court.

It is difficult to summarize here, in one article, his incredible public and private story. He was the wealthiest man in the country, for starters. A richness gaily displayed. But he hadn’t been born rich, he had built his enormous wealth, first as a building contractor, then as a cathodic visionary, with such an unscrupulous impetus as to induce more than one prosecutor to see clearly. The writer Giuseppe Fiori who in 1995 dedicated one of the first biographies of him titled it The seller. Persuading, seducing, pleasing others: this has always been the characteristic of Silvio Berlusconi, who could not get over the fact that instead there could be a large portion of citizens who found his televisions harmful and extremely unacceptable to take the field, because they caught the opportunism of a man who chooses politics not out of vocation, but out of cynical self-defense. It has been pointed out that the virus of populism, which at one point infected the world, spread precisely from the political Knight.

Berlusconi of 1994, those of the first elections, brings with him all the trappings of the future demagogues who will later tread the scene: the rejection of the parties and of “those who were there before”, the anti-parliamentary moods, the Chambers seen as places of wastrel, the rhetoric of the man alone in command, the what do you think of me, the contempt exhibited for culture, the destruction of every collective memory in the sign of an alleged moral palingenesis in the sign of the new. After all, everything started with “Silvio”.

He was the petty bourgeois who came from nowhere, the eponymous figure of a long season. The average Italian liked this, convinced that it would make them rich just as it had made his companies immensely prosperous. Over time he surrounded himself with a group of loyal followers, for whom the Knight – as he was nicknamed thanks to a title obtained in 1977 – was a sort of divinity immune from any criticism: “A group of faithful who offer only pink legends”, as Corrado Stajano noticed. This people sang at its rallies “thank goodness Silvio is here”; on the other stood his opponents, “the communists”, the other Italy for which Silvio was the Cayman, and he denounced its egolatria, the conflict of interests, the ad personam laws, the exorbitant customs and descended in the square, he ran press campaigns (this newspaper was in the front row, often alone), he organized roundabouts, films, books. Two irreconcilable worlds.

Born in 1936, boomer, conservative, basically right-wing, (“the country is going more and more to the left” he will tell Mario Pirani on the Republic of 15 July 1977 to justify the purchase of a share of the Newspaper), protean, bewitched by his instinctive and lying sympathy. He told jokes. He spoke like the man on the street. He showed closeness to ordinary people, to the housewife who watched his programs while she tidied up the house. They forgave him everything, the gaffes, the sexual bulimia, the political inconclusiveness. In the film of Sabina Guzzanti, Dreagleshot in the midst of the Olgettine scandal, a woman from L’Aquila says: “And what’s wrong with him if he likes women? He’s a man!”.

It is thanks to the Fininvest televisions, with the foundation of Canale 5 in 1980, to which Italia Uno and Rete 4 were added, that it imposes itself. Drive In And Dallas break with the pedagogy of the Rai networks. He perfects his talent with a monstrous capacity for work. Legend has it that in the evening, in front of the TV, he watched Fininvest programs instantly pointing out the defects of each program, from the choice of guests, to the framing, to the lights. Obsessive, fussy, before others he grasped the profound changes that were moving in the bowels of society, worn out by the years of terrorism and the cold war and in need of new myths, of a carefree levity. Thus he breaks a convention. A code based until then on two cultures, the Catholic and the Communist one. Milano 2, the neighborhood for the rich, which since 1974 offered its inhabitants cable TV, TeleMilanowas the result of this intuition. The TV thus amplified the desire of the new classes to escape. Drive In, the Sunday format with fast food girls, which landed on Italia Uno in 1983, therefore represented the manifesto of a generation of young people, the paninari, who rejected ideologies and preached disengagement. “Here we don’t do politics, we do TV” the editorial plan. “Run home in a hurry, there’s a snake waiting for you” the jingle with which to attract the masses.

In reality Berlusconi has never been alien to power, on the contrary he was immediately an integral part of it. He enrolled in the P2, card 1816. He Cultivated very solid relationships with the socialists of Bettino Craxi, then firmly in government in an essentially anti-communist design. The Christian Democrats looked at him with diffidence, and those of the DC left, from Scalfaro to Mattarella, will prove to be his most bitter cultural opponents. However, if there is a before and after, it happens in February 1986, with the purchase of Milan, his absolute masterpiece. He refounds a glorious club, but now on the fringes of great football, he draws a coach who comes from B, and who had done well at Parma, but without pedigree, Arrigo Sacchibuys three top Dutch players, Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard, and inaugurates a champagne football that will dominate European football for twenty years, giving a definitive kick to a football sparagnino and catenacciaro.

Dominated by the obsession to impress, he transforms his villa in Arcore into a kind of palace, with Flemish paintings, Renaissance paintings, a Tintoretto, making it the crossroads of public destinies. Everything passes from there, at a certain point, from Versailles in the Brianza area. Berlusconi presents himself as an absolute monarch, in competition with Gianni Agnelli, who in those years was the patron of Juventus, the true king in the collective imagination.

In ’93 the tear. Tangentopoli, which his TV channels initially supported, seems to favor the left. Berlusconi senses danger, he feels threatened. In November, in Casalecchio Reno, on the eve of the elections in Rome, he says that of the two candidates Francesco Rutelli and Gianfranco Fini in the end he would vote for the latter: it is the customs clearance of the right. He says it, not surprisingly, at the inauguration of a hypermarket, the shopping centers will soon become the real squares. It is the breaking of a narrative, the beginning of a formidable ascent. Three months later he dares the unthinkable: he founds a personal party, which he incredibly calls Forza Italia, and presents himself in the elections. He wins. It is the founding act of the Second Republic. The old parties that held Prima, the DC, the PSI, the PCI, are buried under a pile of rubble. He promises a million jobs, a new dream. He gets up after every defeat, showing undoubted fighting skills.

Almost thirty years later, however, what is the political legacy? Very few reforms, in hindsight. It is hard to find a meaning and a legacy. Berlusconi managed himself more than Italy, yet this narrative of his has bewitched our local psyche for over twenty years. Not even scandals, trials, the incredible number of ad personam laws and conflicts of interest have ever tarnished his image. He was still in government.

However Silvio Berlusconi was in the end old, isolated and a little melancholy. Others had taken his place. And now it’s strange to think he’s gone, because he was a novelist. For better or for worse, the mirror of our strange country.