Silvio Berlusconi had enormous energy, a salesman’s talent for persuasion, a wave of the hand for laws that stood in his way, and limitless self-belief. Our obituary
It all went back to his conversation on the train with the hostile vice-president of a pension fund. He desperately needed this man to invest in his first big construction project. His original ploy—getting relatives to pretend they were clamouring for the apartments he had built near an industrial complex outside Milan—had gone embarrassingly wrong. The pension-fund boss had realised he was being duped.
So he did. A poll of young Italians conducted in 1993, the year before he first became prime minister, found they loved him more than Jesus. Though he never succeeded in getting a majority of the electorate to vote for him, those who backed him did so with a fervour rare in democratic societies. At the height of his personality cult, before the 2008 general election, his campaign song was entitled “Thank goodness for Silvio”:‘Prime minister, we are with you.
Then there were the prosecutors who wanted to know, among many other impertinent things, whether his success as a media tycoon was entirely due to his business acumen, or whether it had more to do with the bribing of judges and the illegal funding of the party that let him own a three-channel nationalnetwork. Case after case was brought against him. Yet he always managed to wriggle free, often thanks to laws that guillotined Italy’s lengthy judicial processes.
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