So he founded a party and became premier. But Berlusconi only got excited about football – Corriere.it

Silvio Berlusconi was a madman. On the other hand, this is how he was judged when he took a television under the stairs and said it would compete with Raiwhen he bought a football club on the verge of bankruptcy and promised he would win league titles and European Cups when he founded a party and bet that he would enter Palazzo Chigi
. It was more difficult to get eleven players together on the field than to get eleven million voters to agree in the polls. Indeed the Italians began to vote for him in ’94 when they saw that in eight years he had managed to bring Milan to the top of the world and Canale 5 to the top in ratings. Because Berlusconi considered football and business things too serious to be equated with politics, he believed that an appeal to the “country I love” or an announcement from the running board of a car was not enough to be successful in those fields.

Therefore, the thesis has to be reversed that he used football and TV as a weapon of consent, if anything the consensus was the consequence of his successes in sport and in business. Successes that he failed to match in politics, although he has acquired a role in history that no one else can boast. Because in the years of the Second Republic the Knight was the protagonist of bipolarity to the point of having represented it in full: it was the reason for those who sided with him and the reason for those who sided against him. A feature that distinguishes him from any other personality of the republican era, to the point that the Berlusconi twenty years are defined as the period during which he governed less than his rivals. Berlusconi was so divisive that he was unifying, filling the biographies of his opponents with himself: from Carlo De Benedetti to Romano Prodi, from Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to Antonio Di Pietro.

Theatrical gestures, jokes and even vicissitudes, marked an era with his bandanas, his illnesses, his loves, his brutal clashes against those “balls” who voted to the left, against the “red robes” who didn’t let him govern. He exposed himself, flaunting in public the wound inflicted by whoever had thrown a statuette from the Milan Cathedral at him, seeking the legitimacy of the establishment which – in Italy and in Europe – saw him as an intruder, collecting votes during the electoral campaigns and then dissipating them in government management. He even had a function in the cultural sphere, because gave voice to that part of the country and its intelligence forced into silence by the “dictatorship of the word”, which after the war had imposed its own law deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, who was a “democrat” and who was a “fascist”. And maybe the most sensational aspect of the “Berlusconi revolution”, which broke a system so encysted that it has not yet been eradicated. Yet Berlusconi has never talked about it, as if he were disinterested, thus accrediting the thesis that the cultural “rupture” – also produced through the language of his televisions – was for him only a tool to win the challenge with the left. However, the fact remains that, by freeing that piece of Italy, Berlusconi ended up freeing the whole of Italy, since the conflict finally forced the two Italys to talk to each other. And in the long run to recognize each other.

That would be enough to understand what was Berlusconi’s “twenty years”, mirror of a contradictory, supportive and cynical, generous and fraudulent, innocent and guilty Italy. But beyond the moral verdict and the procedural sentences, there is a political aspect of his story in the square and in the palace that awaits the judgment of history. And which revolves around a question: why is nothing built on this cornerstone? Why does the field of which he was the founder seem destined to decline with him? Berlusconi’s experience in government and that of party leader must be separated. As prime minister he failed to bring about the “liberal revolution”: the tax reform and the justice reform represented the pillars of his design, the eternal promise of a new Italian miracle never realized.

In his defense, Berlusconi has always maintained that the economic situation, the adverse internal and international power plays, and even the hostility of the allies have prevented him from realizing his plan. But there is no doubt that the clash with the “politicised judiciary” and the sequence of ad personam laws, in the shadow of the conflict of interests, took energy away from his government action. The party leader, on the other hand, was given carte blanche and knew no rivals, even when they stood in front of him: from Gianfranco Fini to Giulio Tremonti, passing through Pierferdinando Casini, many have tried to replace it. But the Knight has always had his relationship with the voters on his side. Ratio that began to decline in conjunction with the end of his latest project: the People of Freedom, an intuition with which he aimed to compete with the newborn Pd but above all set out to tear down the last fence. To the right. The fall of the wall between Forza Italia and AN it seemed to pave the way for the structuring of a real inter-class party, fulfilling the promise that Berlusconi had made to his electors: “I will bequeath the largest moderate party in history to the Italians.”

After the conviction for the Mediaset case and his subsequent ouster from the Senate, Berlusconi decided instead to close the People of Freedom. It was a proprietary deed. It was not his ouster from the Senate and social services in Cesano Boscone that decreed the political decline of the Knight, but the desire to put an end to a season that was both a vision. And it all came to an end because of a misunderstanding that was based on a dilemma: who should have been his political heir? Actually the task of Berlusconi was not finding an heir. It was to leave a legacy. Berlusconi had no heirs: the facts have proved it. But Berlusconi’s voters expected an inheritance and that was not the case. So the decline began, because the man who had invented center-right opinion had left it orphaned. Matteo Salvini tried, unsuccessfully, to replace him. Now Giorgia Meloni is trying, we will see with what results.

In any case for the Knight politics has never been a priority as much as a defensive weapon. Berlusconi did not cry that evening in mid-November 2011, when – between two wings of the crowd that mocked him – he went up to the Quirinale to resign as Prime Minister. Instead, he was moved that morning in mid-August 2004 in his villa in Sardinia, after watching a special on the Milan channel about his first eighteen years as president of the club. It is true that he had the specific weight of a Scudetto evaluated on the percentages of the party, but the mechanism of identification with Milan’s victories is clearly superior to any other success of his assets. In fact, in the imagination of the Knight, the descent into the field did not take place on January 26th 1994 but on July 18th 1986when he lands by helicopter at the Milan Arena for the presentation of his team.

And he, who unceremoniously got rid of dolphins and party names, struggled to detach himself from his club. Milan was an exercise in style and leadership for the Cavaliere, as well as a formidable diplomatic tool. To the point that during halftime of an international match he called Adrian Galliani to order his talents not to rage on Turkish adversaries: “Let’s avoid offending Erdogan’s susceptibility”. In football he has won like no other. In politics he won like no other. But his regret is that politics has damaged his football image of him, because no one wanted to approach him – as he deserved – at the Santiago Bernabeu, who also kept close relations with Francisco Franco while he dominated in Europe with his Real Madrid. Yet Berlusconi surpassed Bernabeu, he was the most titled club president in the world history of football. The man of records has always surrounded himself with a team. The last one he has left, that of the Biscione, still boasts the same formation: Fedele Confalonieri, Gianni Letta… They are the witnesses of a time which in fact has already handed over to the Knight’s children.

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