While eyes were on Meloni, Berlusconi has been making a comeback

With all the headlines generated by Giorgia Meloni’s success at the Italian general election, it was easy to miss that Silvio Berlusconi has made an astonishing political comeback.

His Forza Italia party is part of the alliance that should allow her to form a government and become Italy’s first female prime minister. Berlusconi is returning to Italy’s senate, after an almost 10-year absence – though he has been an MEP since 2019 – and may even end up getting a seat in the cabinet. During the campaign, where he used social media to hammer home his message a la Trump and Bolsonaro, he said grandly that he would be a “father figure” to Meloni. In some ways, he has acted as warm-up act for the pair.

It all seems vaguely amusing, the OAP lothario with an air of mischief and who looks like he has just walked out of a 1970s European disco, but it isn’t really.

Centre-right Berlusconi has hitched himself to a government that legitimises the far right which will have implications far beyond Italy. The biggest reason he was not been elected for such a long time was that he was banned from holding public office for six years because of a tax fraud conviction.

In 2013, he was convicted of paying for sex with a minor, charges he later successfully overturned, but in such circumstances, you would have thought he might have avoided jokes on TikTok during the campaign about stealing young men’s girlfriends. No chance.

And, worryingly, there is his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Italy has supported Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and steadfastly throughout every accusation of war crimes and atrocities, the disappearance of thousands of ordinary people, and dubious referendums on the part of Moscow.

But Berlusconi has long been Putin’s friend, he even gave the Russian leader a duvet cover with a life-sized image of the two men shaking hands in 2017. Last week, the kindly uncle mask slipped as Berlusconi claimed Putin had somehow been pushed into building his army up on the Ukraine border, invading and killing, then trying to install “decent people” in government in Kyiv.

Those comments were worrying but may ensure that Meloni, who has pledged to back Nato, will not deviate from Rome’s support for Kyiv. Either way, Berlusconi’s political comeback is worrying. On Thursday he turns 86. Maybe it should be time to retire.

Yours,

David Harding

International editor