Supporters emphasised his leadership skills and charismatic power, his fiscal policy based on tax reduction, and his ability to maintain strong and close foreign relations with both the United States and Russia.

[42] Berlusconi first entered the media world in the 1970s, buying from Giacomo Properzj and Alceo Moretti a small cable television company, TeleMilano, to service units built on his Segrate properties.

Berlusconi was the first to successfully bypass these restrictions by distributing simultaneously pre-recorded broadcasts across multiple local stations, effectively creating the impression of a national live television network.

He was assisted by his connections to Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party and also the prime minister of Italy at that time, whose government passed, on 20 October 1984, an emergency decree legalising the nationwide transmissions made by Berlusconi's television stations.

[70] Berlusconi was criticised for his electoral coalitions with right-wing populist parties (Lega Nord and the National Alliance) and for apologetic remarks about Mussolini; he also officially apologised for Italy's actions in Libya during colonial rule.

His career was racked with controversies and trials;[64] among these was his failure to honour his promise to sell his personal assets in Mediaset, the largest television broadcaster in Italy, to dispel any perceived conflicts of interest.

His political aim was to convince the voters of the Pentapartito, who were shocked and confused by Mani Pulite scandals, that Forza Italia offered both a fresh uniqueness and the continuation of the pro-Western free-market policies followed by Italy since the end of World War II.

[82] In December 1994, following the leaking to the press of news of a fresh investigation by Milan magistrates, Umberto Bossi, leader of the Lega Nord, left the coalition claiming that the electoral pact had not been respected.

[61][86] In 2001, Berlusconi ran again, as leader of the right-wing coalition House of Freedoms (La Casa delle Libertà), which included the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats, Lega Nord, the National Alliance, and other parties.

[110][111] On 18 November 2007, after claiming the collection of more than 7 million signatures (including that of Umberto Bossi) demanding that then President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano call a fresh election,[112] Berlusconi announced from the running board of a car in a crowded Piazza San Babila in Milan that Forza Italia would soon merge or transform into The People of Freedom, also known as the PdL (Il Popolo della Libertà).

[116][117][118] After the sudden fall of the Prodi II Cabinet on 24 January, the break-up of The Union, and the subsequent political crisis, which paved the way for a fresh general election in April 2008, Berlusconi, Gianfranco Fini and other party leaders finally agreed on 8 February 2008 to form the PdL joint list, allied with Lega Nord of Bossi and the Movement for Autonomy of Raffaele Lombardo.

[148] Many believed that the problems and doubts over Berlusconi's leadership and his coalition were one of the factors that contributed to market anxieties over an imminent Italian financial disaster, which could have a potentially catastrophic effect on the 17-nation eurozone and the world economy.

[148] Umberto Bossi, leader of Lega Nord, a partner in Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, was quoted as informing reporters outside parliament, "We asked the prime minister to step aside.

He accused Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Christine Lagarde and Giorgio Napolitano, along with other global economic and financial powers, of having plotted against him and forcing him to resign, because he had refused to accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which according to him, would have sold the country to the IMF.

[180] To support Turkey's application Berlusconi invited Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to take part in a meeting of the European leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, gathered in L'Aquila for the 2009 G8 summit.

During that summit the Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini urged his European colleagues to send "visible and concrete" signs to the countries concerned (Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania).

[212] When Gaddafi faced a civil war in 2011, Italy imposed a freeze on some Libyan assets linked to him and his family, pursuant to a United Nations-sponsored regime[217] and then bombed the country with the violation of Libya of the No-Fly Zone.

[229] Berlusconi's proposed reforms were added to the pillars of his "Contract with the Italians", principally on the form of the Italian Constitution and the state,[229] including the passage from a parliamentary system to a presidential republic,[235] a higher election threshold, the abolition of the Italy's Senate of the Republic, a halving in the number of members of the country's Chamber of Deputies, the abolition of the provinces of Italy, and the reform of the judiciary, with separation of the careers between magistrates and magistrates's liability insurance, from Berlusconi considered impartial.

[256] In 2015, Andrej Babiš, the then Finance Minister of the Czech Republic, was compared to Berlusconi due to his media ownership, business activities, political influence, and legal problems with a prison sentence hanging over him.

[257] British historian Perry Anderson wrote that, despite Berlusconi's reputation as an enfant terrible of the European right, his actual policy record places him "to the left of Bill Clinton, who built much of his career in America on policies—delivering executions in Arkansas, scything welfare in Washington—that would be unthinkable for any Prime Minister in Italy".

The outcome for six of those cases were politically altered to end with "no conviction", because of laws passed by Berlusconi's parliamentary majority shortening the time limit for prosecution of various offences and making false accounting illegal only if there is a specific damaged party reporting the fact to the authorities.

[259][260][261][262][263][264][265] Berlusconi claimed that "this is a manifest judicial persecution, against which I am proud to resist, and the fact that my resistance and sacrifice will give the Italians a more fair and efficient judicial system makes me even more proud",[266] and added that "789 prosecutors and magistrates took an interest in the politician Berlusconi from 1994 to 2006 with the aim of subverting the votes of the Italian people" citing statistics that he said have constituted a "calvary including 577 visits by police, 2,500 court hearings and 174 million euros in lawyers' bills paid by me".

[366][367] During the night hours between 5 and 6 March 2010, the Berlusconi-led Italian government passed a decree "interpreting" the electoral law to let the PDL candidate run for governor in Lazio after she had failed to properly register for the elections.

[408] In October 2010, Berlusconi was chastised by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano after he was filmed telling "offensive and deplorable jokes", including one whose punchline was similar to one of the gravest blasphemies in the Italian language.

The Milan magistrates who indicted and successfully convicted Craxi in their "Clean Hands" investigation laid bare an entrenched system in which businessmen paid hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties or individual politicians in exchange for sweetheart deals with Italian state companies and the government itself.

[419] In December 2007, the audio recording of a phone call between Berlusconi, then leader of the opposition, and Agostino Saccà (general director of RAI) was published by the magazine L'Espresso and caused a scandal in the media.

This was followed by the publication in the newspaper il Giornale (owned by the Berlusconi family) of details with regard to legal proceedings against the editor of Avvenire, Dino Boffo, which seemed to implicate him for a harassment case against the wife of his ex-partner.

[452] The attention of the newspapers was later attracted by photos that the photographer Antonello Zappadu had taken on several occasions; some document a vacation in May 2008 in Berlusconi's summer residence in Porto Rotondo [it], where Czech prime minister Mirek Topolánek appears naked,[453] and during the party young girls in bikinis or topless.

After a couple of hours, while she was being questioned, Berlusconi, who was at the time in Paris, called the head of the police in Milan and pressured for her release, claiming the girl was related to Hosni Mubarak, then President of Egypt, and that to avoid a diplomatic crisis, she was to be brought to the custody of Nicole Minetti.

[495] In April 2023, Berlusconi was hospitalised again at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan,[496] and was treated in intensive care after suffering breathing problems,[497][498] due to severe pneumonia caused by a form of leukaemia.