Italy's longest-serving postwar prime minister, Berlusconi, who has died aged 86, held the job on three occasions, amassing along the way a fortune ranked by Forbes magazine last year as the country's fourth-biggest.
Skilled in the art of not just weathering scandal but emerging from it with his profile and popularity enhanced, he faced prosecution more than 30 times on charges including embezzlement, false accounting and bribing a judge. Many cases failed to go to trial, sometimes because Berlusconi changed the law under which he had been charged.
Only once was he convicted, for tax fraud, in 2013. That led to a four-year prison term, of which three were pardoned, a year's community service and a six-year bar from legislative office - from which he instantly bounced back, in 2019, as an MEP.
Saying Italy needed a charismatic self-made businessman to make it great again, Berlusconi, who had dabbled in music and sung on cruise ships before building a vast personal fortune as a property developer in Milan and with his Fininvest media and TV empire, founded his conservative, pro-market Forza Italia party and entered politics in late 1993.
This story is from the June 16, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the June 16, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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