Book Review: Berlusconi: The Epic Story of the Billionaire Who Took Over Italy

By Alan Friedman

Ask anyone about famous Italians and odds are that they will scratch their head and answer Julius Caesar and Silvio Berlusconi. No other living Italian has played such a prominent role in shaping the future of the country as Berlusconi has. Every Italian seems to have an opinion of Silvio Berlusconi, he is a man you either admire or detest, his larger than life character making indifference all but impossible.

Berlusconi is not an official biography, but when the man himself was approached by Alan Friedman, he agreed to be interviewed and open his private archives. Nearing the end of a long and eventful life, Berlusconi obviously feels the need to tell his life´s story with his own words, which seems entirely reasonable given all the rumors about his personal life and allegations of corruption that has dogged him for many decades. However, and Friedman is astute enough to not play softball with the old man. Berlusconi touches upon all the scandals, corruption and sensationalism that one might wish to hear about, and charts the Milanese businessman’s unlikely rise from humble beginnings.

Born into a working class Milanese family in 1936, Silvio Berlusconi’s fortune is very much self-made, his father was a bank teller and his mother a housewife. During Silvio’s early years, the second world war was raging in Europe. When the allies bombed German held Milan in 1943, Silvio and his family were forced to flee the city and briefly lived in the Swiss countryside. When the war ended, the Berlusconi family returned to Milan and Silvio resumed his studies. He eventually studied law at the university of Milan, where he graduated in 1961. Berlusconi was a bright young man with plenty of drive and ambition, but most importantly he was, as he frequently informs Mr. Friedman, “the most handsome guy on the beach”. He had a passion for music and started a band with some of his friends, which eventually led to Berlusconi working as a cruise ship crooner, singing jazz songs and serenading the passengers every evening. He worked long hours, something he didn´t seem to mind since he enjoyed what he was doing and was popular among guests as well as the staff. One of his band members from those days, Federico Gonfalonieri remains a business associate and close friend.

The life of a cruise ship crooner wasn´t enough for Berlusconi, who was soon drawn to the construction industry. During the nineteen sixties the Italian economy was witnessing a post war boom. Salaries for ordinary people were rising steadily, the economy was robust and there was great demand for housing. A natural dealmaker and salesman, Berlusconi wanted in on the action. Using his family connections, his father having risen from a humble bank teller to one of the managing directors of the small Banca Rasini, Berlusconi was able to attract financiers for buying and developing a plot of land in central Milan. Berlusconi was adept at utilizing the contacts at his disposal, and since there was a boom going on it wasn´t too difficult to attract buyers and investors. Berlusconi´s meagre budget meant that he employed friends and relatives to work on the development while he himself worked long hours fulfilling a plethora of roles ranging from entrepreneur, architect, construction foreman and salesman. The development project went well and, buoyed by his success, Berlusconi soon set about grander property schemes as his fame and wealth grew. 

When the property market collapsed in 1963, the young developer ran into serious trouble. It is a testament to Berlusconi´s skill as a dealmaker and his solid work ethic that he managed to pull off his biggest deal yet in this adversarial climate. Unable to find any individual buyers for the apartment complex he was developing on the outskirts of Milan, Berlusconi got the idea to try and convince a pension fund to buy the whole development. The board, which finally relented and travelled all the way from Rome view the construction site, made no secret of their reluctance to close the deal. Like a young Napoleon requisitioning canons from hundreds of miles away in order to batter down the enemy’s fortifications at the siege of Toulon, Silvio pulled out all the stops to beautify his construction site and woo the pension fund’s board members. He had birch trees shipped in from Holland and uprooted an entire lawn he had bought from Salesian monks. Family members were press ganged into volunteering whatever furniture they could spare in order to furnish the display apartments. When one holdout director was blocking the sale, Berlusconi was able to charm his secretary and ask her to book passage on the midnight train from Rome to Milan that her boss was going to travel on. Hiding behind a newspaper, Berlusconi waited until the hapless board-member was seated next to him, before he pounced. During the hours that followed he succeeded in persuading him to invest in the development, and they parted amicably as best of friends. Faced with adversity, Berlusconi had at last come through in spectacular fashion. Throughout his life he has remained steadfast in his belief that he can convince anyone of anything as long as he can get face to face with them and deploy his charm, something he tried to do many years later when George W. Bush geared up for the invasion of Iraq. His flair for the theatrical, for setting the stage where his showmanship and razzmatazz comes into full bloom, can be traced from the real estate development he tried to beautify all the way to the 2002 NATO summit in Italy and frequent meetings with Muammar Gadhafi in his Bedouin tent, where the two leaders used to happily pose before the cameras.

Before Berlusconi entered the scene and shook things up, Italian television was dominated by Rai, the staid and conservative government owned network. At midnight all broadcasting ceased and viewers would be shown a test card with the occasional loud beep to remind them to turn off their TV-sets. Television was considered a public good that the state provided to its citizens, and what little advertising Rai showed was discreet and toned down, and didn´t increase sales for the products they showed in any measurable way. Berlusconi explains to Mr. Friedman that watching those ads was like pissing in your pants, “You get a kind of warm sense of well-being, but nobody notices anything”. Naturally, this uncharted territory, where no media executive had gone before, beckoned Berlusconi like a siren’s call. Establishing himself in the labyrinthine and often corrupt world of Italian media, starting on a small scale in his native Milan, Berlusconi’s media empire grew rapidly. Spearheaded by his flagship channel, Canale 5, Silvio Berlusconi soon became the new face of Italian television. Before they knew what hit them, the Italians were treated to American movies and sitcoms, interspersed with glitzy ads for all kinds of consumer products. Knowing his audience well, Berlusconi’s flagships shows featured scantily dressed ladies dancing to the latest pop music as well as bawdy- working class humor. Having been shown something they didn’t know that they wanted, the Italian people quickly acquired a taste for ostentatious Berlusconi-style entertainment. Italy’s intellectual community complained about superficial consumerism, but now that the genie was out of the bottle it proved impossible to put it back in. Berlusconi’s successes meant that he was a national celebrity as well as one of the richest men in Italy.

The latter he proved beyond doubt by buying the Ac Milan football team in 1986. As a young boy, he used to talk football with his father when he returned home from work each night, now Berlusconi owned team that both he and his father had always loved. Over the years Berlusconi hired a number of successful coaches and helped lead Milan to several Champions League victories.        

During the early nineteen nineties, Italy’s political establishment was rocked by a series of corruption scandals that upended the established political order. Into this power vacuum stepped the billionaire tycoon turned politician Silvio Berlusconi, with his newly founded Forza Italia Party. Berlusconi himself says that he feared for Italy if the communist party took power, which looked likely after the Christian Democrats, their main opposition, had imploded. The communists had at this point changed their name to the Democratic Party of the Left, but that did little to assuage Berlusconi’s fears. Forza Italia’s aggressive marketing and center right policies caught the public mood, no doubt Berlusconi’s TV channels had helped grease the skids, and in 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was elected president of Italy. However, his first tenure in office turned out to be short lived, after allegations of corruption, he was forced to resign the following year. All in all, Berlusconi served as Italy’s president on three occasions, 1994-95, 2001-06 and 2008-11. His days as a business tycoon were marred by allegations of corruption, which got steadily worse after he entered politics. His detractors say that Berlusconi only entered the political arena in order to dismiss cases filed against him and rig the judicial system, and that he has consistently strived so subvert the Italian judiciary. When Friedman touches on these issues, Berlusconi becomes irritated and tight lipped, yet he insists that all his life he has been subjected to a consistent campaign by communist forces to bring himself, his party and his businesses to ruin. Presumably so that Rai could get back to the business of showing twenty minute commercials where you didn’t know what product was being advertised.      

If what Berlusconi says is true, the Italian left has waged a consistent and incredibly effective campaign to plant false evidence and defame Berlusconi over the course of many decades. If his opponents truly were that crafty one wonders why they have consistently been unable to win an election and hang on to the reigns of government. The chance that Berlusconi is innocent of all the charges that have been levied against him over the years seems slim at best, yet it is undeniably so that Italy’s left wing has steadfastly opposed him on ideological grounds.

The charges of corruption aside, what we do know is that Berlusconi didn’t succeed in unifying Italy, and failed to deliver the structural reforms he promised. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Berlusconi legacy is one rich with bombast but short on substance. Italy today faces many problems, among others a potential banking crisis that has economists in the EU deeply worried, problems that grew worse or weren’t addressed properly during Berlusconi’s three terms in office. At the same time, Berlusconi can’t take the blame for all of Italy’s problems, the country has long had an unstable climate where governments that try to enact reforms are short lived. He certainly found himself addressing wobbly coalitions with all the staying power of wet cardboard and tried to do what was right from his perspective, even if that meant enacting legislation that helped his businesses.

During his time in office Berlusconi made some interesting friends, and to this day talks glowingly about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. During the early 2000s Berlusconi acted as a useful conduit between east and west, maintaining close relationships with the Bush administration as well as with the Kremlin. One glaring failure is, however, his inability to dissuade Bush from invading Iraq, something he tried to do but may in hindsight have been a pointless exercise. Another great friend was Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, a colorful autocrat who travelled with a retinue of female bodyguards and lived in a grand Bedouin tent whenever he visited foreign leaders. The intervention in Libya pitted Berlusconi against his nemesis, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy. He viewed Sarkozy as trying to thwart Italian interests in Libya, and after Gadaffi was ousted his country’s investments in the desert country plummeted. Italy’s eastern ties, however, still remain. The country was reluctant to launch sanctions against Russia after the annexation of Ukraine and still imports large amounts of Russian oil and natural gas.

During the Eurozone crisis, Italy’s economy was on the rocks, and Berlusconi’s enemies saw a chance to get rid of him at last. When Sarkozy loyalist and former French finance minister Christine Lagarde was named the new head of the IMF, Berlusconi came under intense pressure. Despite his best efforts, the new American president, Barack Obama, didn’t find him all that simpatico either. Some frantic political maneuvering notwithstanding, Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011. Reading between the lines, Berlusconi seems to have felt misunderstood by boring stiffs like Obama and Lagarde, the latter of whom visibly baulked when he tried telling her some of his bawdy jokes. Despite his age and his inglorious departure from office, however, Berlusconi still harbors political ambitions and remains a force to be reckoned with in Italian politics. 

Alan Friedman does an excellent job of telling the unlikely story of Berlusconi’s rise to become Italy’s most powerful man as well as his eventual downfall. Berlusconi’s own words lends credence to the story but, as Friedman himself admits, he’s not entirely sure who the real Berlusconi is. He is certainly someone who has a showman’s mentality who wants you to like him, no matter what room he is in, but getting at the real Berlusconi seems like a fruitless exercise. You get the feeling that the lengthy audience Freidman is granted to Berlusconi’s manor home is an attempt to burnish his tarred image, possibly for a political comeback, and that he is whoever he thinks he needs to be in order to get what he wants from you. All in all, Berlusconi is an excellent autobiography and a highly illuminating read if you are interested in current events and European politics, but who the real man is beneath all the bluster and Bunga-Bunga remains a mystery.