[29] In November 2008, the national council of the party, presided by Alfredo Biondi, voted to merge Forza Italia into The People of Freedom (PdL),[30] Berlusconi's new political vehicle, whose official foundation took place in March 2009.

Italy was shaken by a series of corruption scandals known as Tangentopoli and the subsequent police investigation, called Mani pulite.

[40] In a couple of months Forza Italia became one of the leading Italian parties, achieving a large consensus through an accurate strategy of communication and pounding electoral spots aired by the Mediaset TV channels.

[42] The first Berlusconi-led government had a short life and fell in December, when Lega Nord left the coalition, after disagreements over pension reform and the first avviso di garanzia (preliminary notice of an investigation) for Berlusconi, passed by Milan prosecutors.

However, the party obtained substantial successes in the 1995 Italian regional elections, both in the North (winning in Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto) and the South (Campania, Apulia and Calabria).

In 1996 the Pole for Freedoms coalition led by Forza Italia lost that year's general election and began what Berlusconi called "the crossing of the desert", something that could have proved fatal for such a young and unstructured party.

Between 1996 and 1998, the party started to strengthen its organisation under Claudio Scajola, a former Christian Democrat who served as national coordinator of Forza Italia from 1996 to 2001.

The incumbent Berlusconi-led government narrowly lost to The Union coalition, which returned Romano Prodi as prime minister, relegating Forza Italia and its House of Freedoms allies to opposition.

On 18 November, after Forza Italia claimed to have collected the signatures of more than 7 million Italians (including Umberto Bossi) against Romano Prodi's second government to ask the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano to call a fresh election,[44] Berlusconi announced that Forza Italia would have soon merged or transformed into The People of Freedom (PdL) party.

[46] Finally, on 8 February, Berlusconi and Fini agreed to form a joint list under the banner of "The People of Freedom", allied with Lega Nord.

In June 2013 Berlusconi announced the upcoming revival of Forza Italia, and the transformation of the People of Freedom into a centre-right coalition.

[18] Alessandro Campi has written that "the political culture of Forza Italia – a curious and, on many respects, untold mixture of 'liberalism' and 'democratic populism' – deserves to be described as an 'anti-ideological ideology', ... as a synthesis or fusion of very diverse political families and traditions (from liberal Catholicism to social conservatism, from reformist socialism to economic liberalism), kept together by the mobilizing appeal to 'freedom'.

[59] Forza Italia claimed to be a fresh new party, with no ties with the last governments of the so-called First Republic, and at the same time to be the heir of the best political traditions of Italy: Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi, Social Democrat Giuseppe Saragat, Liberal Luigi Einaudi and Republican Ugo La Malfa were considered as party icons.

[51] In a speech during a party congress in 1998, Berlusconi himself proclaimed: "our liberal vision of the State is perfectly in agreement with the Catholic social teaching".

This government which centrist, liberal, with Catholics and reformists, intends to advance with policies that the left-wing promises by word of mouth.

[65]Sandro Bondi, a leading member of the party, wrote: Forza Italia considers liberal classics as Croce, Sturzo, Hayek and Einaudi as reference authors.

Forza Italia has imparted a deep cultural innovation, combining the language of the Church tradition with the liberal and reformist thought.

[66] The party usually gave to its members freedom of conscience on moral issues (and hence a free vote), as in the case of the referendum on stem-cell research,[67] but leading members of the party, including Silvio Berlusconi,[68] Giulio Tremonti and Marcello Pera[69] (who is himself non-Catholic, although friend of Pope Benedict XVI), spoke in favour of "abstention" (as asked by the Catholic Church,[70] to not surpass the 50% of turnout needed for making the referendum legally binding).

While Pera campaigned hard for the success of the boycott along with most FI members, both Berlusconi and Tremonti explicitly said that "abstention" was their personal opinion, not the official one of the party.

The political scientist Giovanni Orsina has defined Berlusconism, as he terms the ideology of Forza Italia and its leader, as an "emulsion of populism and liberalism", more specifically right-liberalism.

As the main ideologic themes of Berlusconism, Orsina identified the myth of the "good" civil society (as opposed to the state apparatus), a "friendly, minimal state" (providing services to citizens rather than regulating their lives), "hypopolitics" (i.e. the containment of political conflicts, after the hyper-politisation of Italian society during the "First Republic") and the identification of a "new virtuous elite".

According to Orsina, Berlusconism sanctified "the people" that embodied all virtues while being "betrayed" by the (old) elites, a typical element of populist ideologies.

However, Berlusconi viewed "the people" as a pluralistic and diverse collection of individuals, not an ethnically, historically and culturally homogeneous unit.

[71][72] Most members of the party were former Christian Democrats (DC): Giuseppe Pisanu (former member of the leftist faction of DC and Minister of Interior), Roberto Formigoni (President of Lombardy), Claudio Scajola (former Minister of the Interior and of Industry), Enrico La Loggia, Renato Schifani, Guido Crosetto, Raffaele Fitto, Giuseppe Gargani, Alfredo Antoniozzi, Giorgio Carollo, Giuseppe Castiglione, Francesco Giro, Luigi Grillo, Maurizio Lupi, Mario Mantovani, Mario Mauro, Osvaldo Napoli, Antonio Palmieri, Angelo Sanza, Riccardo Ventre and Marcello Vernola are only some remarkable examples.

Several members were former Socialists (PSI), as Giulio Tremonti (vice-president of the party and former Minister of Economy), Franco Frattini (Vice President of the European Commission), Fabrizio Cicchitto (national deputy-coordinator of the party), Renato Brunetta, Francesco Musotto, Amalia Sartori, Paolo Guzzanti and Margherita Boniver.

Also Antonio Martino and Giancarlo Galan were formers Liberals, Jas Gawronski was a leading Republican, while Marcello Pera has a Socialist and Radical background.

Members of Forza Italia were divided in factions, which were sometimes mutable and formed over the most important political issues, despite previous party allegiances; however, it is possible to distinguish some patterns.

A scheme of the internal factions within Forza Italia could be this: Christian democrats and liberal-centrists were undoubtedly the strongest factions within the party, but all four were mainstream for a special issue: for example liberals and liberal-centrists were highly influential over economic policy, Christian democrats led the party over ethical issues (although there was a substantial minority promoting a more progressive outlook), while social democrats had their say in defining the party's policy over labour market reform and, moreover, it is thanks to this group (and to those around Tremonti, he himself a former Socialist) that constitutional reform was at the top of Forza Italia's political agenda.

[42] In 1995, Forza Europa merged with the European Democratic Alliance to form the Union for Europe group alongside the Rally for the Republic of France and Fianna Fáil of Ireland.