Billionaire who entered politics late, dynamitist of the “system”, master of communication, monster of the stage and television: Silvio Berlusconi is the one who paved the way for the populists of the right. “He is the first. He invented it all,” summarizes John Foot, Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol.

“He doesn’t need a party, everything revolves around him, his life, his success as a businessman, simple slogans, use of television, all the tricks that other populists will copy after him, from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage, from Viktor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro. He made his fortune in construction and then in the media. It first came to the general election in 1994,” continues the Bristol professor.

“The country that, with absolute justification, mistrusts prophets and saviors, needs people who step on the ground (…), people who are young in front of the corrupt, outdated orphans of communism,” he said in a video he presented at the time, when he even rejected the rhetorical devices that now belong to the inevitable toolbox of the nascent populist. He even dared to describe himself as a “worker-prime minister” who will end the politics of incomprehensible chatter, stupid arguments and unprofessional politicians.

The truth is that Berlusconi arrives in the midst of “Mani Pulite”, the giant anti-corruption operation that began in 1992 and decapitated the political class. It thus opened before the billionaire a wide avenue where he could sell his political virginity as he sampled the constructions. And it doesn’t matter that, when he came to power, he did not hesitate to protect himself for the multitude of legal proceedings brought against him by relaxing the legislation on falsifying financial results, on corruption or changing the statutes of limitations for financial crimes.

“Why should we pay scientists when we make the best shoes in the world?”

Many Italians think Berlusconi looks like them. His faults, his secrets that he washes away on Sunday in confession: they don’t like taxation very much either, and they work a little “black”, and they like scantily clad little girls, and they love football. They feel that they are paying too many taxes for a hypertrophic State, while they themselves are cutting their own expenses to get by. Berlusconi addresses them when he cuts public funding for Research: “Why do we have to pay scientists, when we make the best shoes in the world?”.

“Berlusconi is selling the narrative of the self-made man who doesn’t need the state thanks to a ‘liberal revolution’ that will allow all Italians who want to be entrepreneurs,” says philosopher Anna Bonalume, author of the essay “An month with a populist” on the subject of Matteo Salvini. “This commitment – I’m one of you, you can be like me – is the very essence of populism,” he notes.

A man alone against the elites to defend the people, a fortune built on the obstacles put up by a cannibal State, a language familiar and often shallow, a “special” relationship with women, media at his command: “Trumpism bears the stamp of Berlusconism”, writes the newspaper La Repubblica today under the headline “The Populist Prime Minister”.

“A Trump, 30 years earlier”

Berlusconi is “Trump, 30 years earlier,” says Daniele Albertazzi, professor of political science at the University of Surrey. “The political elite betrayed you, but here I am, I have made billions thanks to my intelligence, my hard work, and I want to do for the country what I did for myself.”

And like Donald Trump, Berlusconi is constantly portrayed as a victim to justify his political and judicial setbacks. “A victim of the judges, the political system, the machinery, the referees,” says John Foote. However, there is one important difference between the two men: Berlusconi “doesn’t want to change policy for ideological reasons, everything he does is only about him and his business”.

This has never stopped Berlusconi from playing the religion card, a hallmark of right-wing populist identity on both sides of the Atlantic. A religious devotion that causes astonishment “if we think of Silvio Berlusconi’s extramarital affairs, even with very young women even when he was 80 years old”. These contradictions have never shaken a Trump or a Berlusconi, who share an insulting vocabulary towards women in the belief that they are approaching “the people”. When the former says of women that he likes to “grab them by the m…”, the latter promises his footballers “a coach with p…” if they win.