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 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, Berlusconi was constant entertainment — both comic and tragic, with more than a touch of off-color material — until they booed him off the stage. 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, 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. 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.

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.

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 council member. 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 Berlusconi, signaled that enough was enough.

But what really dislodged 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.

Nicknamed Il Cavaliere, or The Knight, a name usually applied in Italy to business or community leaders, Berlusconi cultivated his image. Photo shoots of him and his family in the magazines owned by his Mondadori publishing empire depicted him as a family man, though a stylish one. Despite the season, he often sported a tangerine sheen.

That glow had faded considerably by 2013, when he was stripped of his Senate seat after being convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and losing his parliamentary immunity. His four-year prison sentence was reduced to 10 months of community service, which he performed in a home for seniors near Milan.

The tax fraud conviction led to his being barred from holding public office until May 2018. While he appealed the ban, he still acted as a kingmaker in Italian politics. But his campaign in 2018 for his party in national elections, at age 81, showed the limitations of the power of his personality.

He recast himself as Italy’s reassuring grandfather figure in an uncertain time, and failed spectacularly. He and his party, which built Italy’s center-right coalition when he entered politics in 1994, had become increasingly irrelevant. In 2018, the conservative leadership moved to Matteo Salvini, the hard-right leader of the nationalist League party (formerly the Northern League party). By 2020, the once marginal post-Fascist party Brothers of Italy had outperformed Berlusconi’s once powerful Forza Italia.

In 2021, he was a weakened force who threw his support behind the establishment government of Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank appointed to lead Italy as a technocrat. But Berlusconi still dreamed big. In 2022, his ambitions to become the country’s head of state, a seven-year position usually filled by a figure of unimpeachable integrity and sobriety whose influence flows from moral authority, drew mockery. To campaign, the billionaire who hoped to wash away decades of stains and rewrite his legacy, made hours of phone calls to disaffected lawmakers in search of votes.

And for all of his talk of responsibility, Berlusconi helped pull the rug out from Draghi when he sensed an opportunity in 2022 to return to power and helped set off early elections. He re-entered government, at 85, as a junior coalition partner to Meloni, once a junior minister in Berlusconi’s government, who led the Brothers of Italy and became prime minister and the dominant power in Italian politics. In the most right-wing government since Mussolini, Berlusconi argued that he would keep a toe in the center.

But he mostly embarrassed Meloni by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin and getting caught, perhaps on purpose, writing mean things about Meloni on his desk in the Senate, from which he had once been exiled for a fraud conviction.

It was a dramatic fall for a proud man who once called himself the Jesus Christ of politics, saying, “I am a patient victim, I bear everything, I sacrifice myself for everyone.”




Critics note that with Berlusconi, Italy sacrificed plenty, too.

Roots in Real Estate

Silvio Berlusconi was born on Sept. 29, 1936, in Milan in the middle-class neighborhood of Isola Garibaldi. He was the eldest of three children of Luigi and Rosella (Bossi) Berlusconi. His father was a bank clerk; his mother a homemaker. During World War II, when Silvio was 7, his father fled to Switzerland for two years to avoid conscription in the army of Mussolini’s rump Salò Republic.

Silvio attended a prestigious boarding school in Milan. He studied law at Milan’s State University and graduated with high marks in 1961. While there, he met Marcello Dell’Utri, a student from Palermo in Sicily, who would become one of his closest business associates and a co-founder of Forza Italia.

Milan in the 1960s was the epicenter of the “Italian miracle,” the economic boom that powered the country nearly to full employment. Its population was growing, and so was a need for housing. The young Berlusconi, intent on becoming an entrepreneur, was full of ambition and ideas but lacked capital. In one of his first real estate ventures, in 1961, he persuaded the owner of the small bank where his father worked, Banca Rasini, to be a guarantor. That led to a residential development and other lucrative projects.

Berlusconi’s largest undertaking was Milano 2, an enormous suburban gated community built in the 1970s. Home to about 14,000 residents, it encompassed six schools, a church, cinema, shops, green space and an artificial lake. The origins of the initial investment remain murky, but a television station set up exclusively for the complex would form the foundation of his media empire.

In a country with three state-run national television networks, Berlusconi saw potential in creating private national networks. Over time he built up three and became their leading shareholder. That would have been considered a monopoly elsewhere, but Italian regulations did not yet consider it such.

Berlusconi’s television offered glamour and sex. There were scantily clad women, game shows and American nighttime soap operas such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty.”

He was helped by Craxi, the head of the Socialist Party and a two-time prime minister, whose ties with Socialist parties across Europe helped Berlusconi expand his television holdings in France and Spain in an era of privatizations.

In 1992, magistrates in Milan made the first arrests in a sweeping corruption investigation focusing on bribes paid to politicians by business leaders in exchange for contracts. A third of parliament came under indictment, as did many business leaders and thousands of government officials. The scandal, called Tangentopoli, or Bribesville, in the press, marked the end of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, which had governed Italy in the postwar period. To avoid prosecution, Craxi fled to his villa in Tunisia, where he died in 2000.

With the demise of the Socialists, Berlusconi lost his political patron at a time when new regulations were most likely to force him to sell off some of his television channels. The center-left looked poised to win the next elections.

After consulting with his advisers, he took matters into his own hands, founding Forza Italia in December 1993 and introducing the most sophisticated use of political branding ever seen in Italy.

In January 1994, he used a new medium to announce his run for office: a video message that he aired on his three national television networks. “Italy is the country I love,” he began, dressed in a somber suit and sitting at a desk in his 18th-century villa, with family photos on a bookshelf in the background. “Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here, I learned from my father my job as a businessman.”

His salesmanship and promises of economic prosperity were convincing. After a two-month campaign, Forza Italia won the election.

‘Not Fit to Lead’

With Forza Italia leading a center-right alliance, Berlusconi became prime minister. But the government lasted only seven months before a coalition partner, the anti-immigrant Northern League, withdrew support. Still, Forza Italia was now a player. Berlusconi thrived as a vocal opposition figure in the late 1990s, when a series of center-left governments helped Italy meet the qualifications for the introduction of the euro currency there.

Those center-left governments, however, failed to pass conflict-of-interest legislation that might have thwarted the overlap between Berlusconi’s business empire and his work as a lawmaker. His political survival had always benefited from an opposition divided between former Communists and former Christian Democrats. Now the Italian judiciary became Berlusconi’s de facto opposition.

Ahead of national elections in 2001, The Economist magazine put Berlusconi on its cover with the headline “Fit to run Italy?” The accompanying article said, “In any self-respecting democracy it would be unthinkable that the man assumed to be on the verge of being elected prime minister would recently have come under investigation for, among other things, money-laundering, complicity in murder, connections with the Mafia, tax evasion and the bribing of politicians, judges and the tax police. Berlusconi is not fit to lead the government of any country, least of all one of the world’s richest democracies.”

He won the election anyway.

In 1980, at age 44 and still married to Dall’Oglio, Berlusconi met Veronica Lario, an actress. When their first daughter was born in 1984, Berlusconi recognized the child and separated from his wife. He married Lario in 1990. The couple divorced in 2014. In 2022, at age 85, he had a “symbolic” wedding with his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, then 32, in which she wore a white wedding dress and they cut an enormous wedding cake. Already a member of parliament, she returned to represent a Sicilian town she had never campaigned in, and became a gatekeeper and power broker.

Berlusconi is survived by a daughter, Maria Elvira, known as Marina, who is chair of Fininvest, the family’s holding company, and a son, Pier Silvio, who is deputy chair and chief executive officer of the Berlusconi-controlled broadcast company, Mediaset, both from his first marriage; three children, Barbara, Eleonora and Luigi, from his second marriage; a brother, Paolo; 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.