Far right Italian nationalist Silvio Berlusconi dies at age 86

[Anerdyblackguy]

I really hate this guy.



ROME — Silvio Berlusconi, the brash media mogul who revolutionized Italian television using privately owned channels to become the country’s most polarizing and prosecuted prime minister over multiple stints in office and an often scandalous quarter-century of political and cultural influence, died on Monday at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. He was 86.

His death was confirmed in a statement by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with whom he was a coalition partner in the current Italian government. No cause of death was given, but he was hospitalized last week as part of his treatment for chronic leukemia and other ailments.

To Italians, Mr. Berlusconi was constant entertainment — both comic and tragic, with more than a touch of off-color material — until they booed him off the stage. But he kept coming back. To economists, he was the man who helped drive the Italian economy into the ground. To political scientists, he represented a bold new experiment in television’s impact on voters. And to tabloid reporters, he was a delicious fount of scandal, gaffes, ribald insults and sexual escapades.

A gifted orator and showman who sang on cruise ships as a young man, Mr. Berlusconi was first elected prime minister in 1994, after the “Bribesville” scandals, which had dismantled Italy’s postwar power structure and removed his political patron, former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, from office. Mr. Berlusconi famously announced that he would “enter the field” of politics to deliver business-minded reforms, a move that his supporters framed as a selfless sacrifice for the country but that his critics considered a cynical effort to protect his financial interests and secure immunity from prosecution related to his business affairs.

That first go in office collapsed quickly, but voters, many persuaded by his televised signing of a “Contract With Italians,” overwhelmingly chose him, Italy’s richest man, to lead the country again in 2001, this time as the head of Italy’s largest parliamentary majority since World War II.

That center-right governing coalition lasted longer than any government had since the war. In 2005, he became prime minister again after a government reshuffle, then used his power to upend the electoral law to give himself a better shot at winning the next general election. He narrowly lost that bid, in 2006, but stayed at center stage and returned to power in snap elections in 2008.

His victory demoralized a generation of the left. Opponents were both obsessed with Mr. Berlusconi and utterly vexed by him, a politician who seemed to be made of electoral Teflon despite a raft of international faux pas, failures to deliver on pie-in-the-sky promises and the tanking of the Italian economy.

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Liberal politicians, and the prosecutors he demonized as their judicial wing, watched in dismay as he used appeals and statutes of limitations to avoid punishment despite being convicted of false accounting, bribing judges and illegal political party financing.

His governments spent an inordinate amount of time on laws that seemed tailor-made to protect him from decades of corruption trials, a goal that some of his closest advisers acknowledged was why he had entered politics in the first place.
One law overturned a court ruling that would have required Mr. Berlusconi to give up one of his TV networks; others downgraded the crime of false accounting and reduced the statute of limitations by half, effectively cutting short several trials involving his businesses. He enjoyed parliamentary immunity, but in 2003 his government went further, passing a law granting him immunity from prosecution while he remained in office — in effect suspending his corruption trials.
Some of those laws were eventually ruled unconstitutional, and in 2009 the country’s highest court struck down the immunity law.

The damage of those corruption charges was then compounded by accusations that he paid for sex with an underage girl nicknamed Ruby Heart-Stealer. He was later acquitted, but the story was catnip for the global tabloid press. So, too, were reports that he held “bunga bunga” sex parties with women allegedly procured by a news anchorman on one of his channels and a former dental hygienist and showgirl who became a Milan regional councilwoman. Mr. Berlusconi maintained that these were merely elegant dinners.

The scandals incited large-scale protests by women. Even the Roman Catholic Church, an influential force in Italian politics that had often held its nose when it came to Mr. Berlusconi, signaled that enough was enough.
But what really dislodged Mr. Berlusconi from power was not a sudden ethical awakening in Italy or a tide of intolerance toward his extracurricular habits, but the unspinnable fact of Europe’s debt crisis and the lack of confidence among European leaders and debtholders that he could lead the country out of it.

By the time he finally resigned in 2011, amid a fractured conservative coalition and general national malaise, a good deal of damage seemed to have been done. Many analysts held him responsible for harming Italy’s reputation and financial health and considered his time in power a lost decade that the country had struggled to recover from.
Ultimately, Mr. Berlusconi was much more than his time in office, the policies he introduced or the allies he backed.
His often outrageous, norm-warping and personally sensational approach to public life, which became known as Berlusconism, made him the most influential Italian politician since Mussolini. He transformed the country and offered a different template for a leader, one that would have echoes in Donald J. Trump and beyond.

Man of Many Faces​

Mr. Berlusconi used his media empire to manipulate — and for more than 20 years dominate — Italian politics, which had long been ideological and issue-driven. It was as if he had turned a black-and-white picture into Technicolor television filled with endless hours of reality show programming, of which he was the unquestionable maestro. The impact on the country’s culture is hard to overstate.

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

By turns clownish and devious, optimistic and cynical, down-to-earth populist and stratospheric elitist, he was the fault line along which Italy broke.

Mr. Berlusconi’s family-friendly campaigns often had the support of the church. His faith in the entrepreneurial spirit was unwavering. But with all that came an unapologetic hedonism that valued riches, beauty and the adoration of youthful vigor, as illustrated by the showgirl image of the women he promoted on his television channels and sometimes in government. What emerged was an updated playboy ideal that has left its mark on the imaginations, and aspirations, of countless Italians.
Mr. Berlusconi’s knack for synthesizing — critics would say dumbing down — politics to slick messaging and bullet points is now followed by even those who claim to reject everything he stood for. And his savior style (“Thank God we have Silvio,” a party anthem went) still has its disciples.

In Mr. Berlusconi’s world, whoever was offended by his flamboyance, or his sexist jokes, or his conflicts of interest, or his aversion to paying taxes — he once called refusing to pay high taxes “morally acceptable” — was lumped in with self-righteous left-wing bores or fun-and-freedom-hating Communists.

He had a genius for victimization, which he would fall back on in response to criticism of his policies or of his personal behavior or to investigations into accusations that swirled around him — of conflicts of interests, of corruption, of ties to the Mafia and powerful Masonic lodges. Judges were often “Communists” on a witch hunt, a talking point that resonated with Italians frustrated with a troubled and slow-moving justice system.

He even capitalized on his infection with the coronavirus in September 2020, calling in to a political meeting from the Milan hospital where he was being treated and claiming that doctors had told him that, out of all the thousands of tests conducted there since the start of the epidemic, “I have come out in the top five in terms of the strength of the virus.”

Mr. Berlusconi’s cult-of-personality politics, his freewheeling governance style and even his focus on hair care prompted comparisons to Mr. Trump. Both men played up their personal wealth as a qualification for government, and both relished dominating news cycles with often outlandish behavior.

But in contrast to Mr. Trump, Mr. Berlusconi came from modest means, and the size of his fortune, in the billions, was never questioned.

His politics generally fit into a traditional center-right paradigm, and his advisers said privately that he detested the comparison to Mr. Trump. After the U.S. Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters in January 2021, Mr. Berlusconi wrote that the attack would “darken the historical memory of this presidency.”
But Mr. Berlusconi was not above associating with the far right for political gain. An opportunist, he aligned with a party with ties to Italy’s Fascist past, though he did not share their Italians-first nostalgia, and he deepened Italy’s relationship with Russia and Turkey. But he also avidly supported the United States and NATO, and believed in the neoliberal, pro-European and anti-communist conservatism of the postwar era.

Mr. Berlusconi could treat world leaders as if they were guests on his reality television program. He called President Barack Obama, who found him amusing, “young, handsome and sun-tanned.” Wearing a bandanna, he hung out in Sardinia with Tony Blair, a British former prime minister. He once kept Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany waiting on the tarmac. He wore matching furry hats with a frequent Russian drinking buddy, President Vladimir V. Putin, whom, years later, and to the embarrassment of his coalition partner and much of Italy, he vocally supported in the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Berlusconi’s brazen use of television and other media outlets he controlled, and his knack for dominating coverage in those he didn’t, helped secure his political standing. His party, Forza Italia, or Go Italy — named after a soccer cheer — was established as a self-funded advertising vehicle for his candidacy. He never really anointed a successor.

“If you look at him from a global perspective, he represents the first real postmodern politician,” said Alexander Stille, the author of “The Sack of Rome:Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi.” He added, in an interview: “It’s not an accident that he comes along after the end of the Cold War. He represents a kind of politics that, despite the ritual anti-communism of his political message, is a content-less politics. It’s a personality-driven politics in which he proposes himself, rather than a particular political program, as the answer to the country’s problems.”

 

[WIA20XX]

Obama's 'tan' – Berlusconi does it again

Obama's wife Michelle also called 'tanned' by Berlusconi in latest gaffe at rally of conservative supporters

www.theguardian.com

 

[hashmander]

fukk him and fukk serie a. old racist fukks.

 

[Arianne Martell]

Wasn’t he a coli legend?

Surprise TLR doesn’t have a sticky thread full of memes and smilies of this guy

 

[88m3]

rest in piss

 

[ReasonableMatic]

 

[Jx2]

Just waiting to find out Trump and his KFC affliction has run it's final course

 

[DrBanneker]

Ah the Italian Rupert Murdoch. I have seen Italians claim his channels and papers dumbed people down like the Fox/NY Post/Daily Mail. His legacy is moving Italy right enough a damn proto-fascist is PM. Oh well.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Surprised there wasn’t an Epstein connection