After helping to bring down Prime Minister Mario Draghi last month by withdrawing his support, Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party looks set to return to power.
Ten years after being ousted from the Italian Parliament because of a conviction for tax evasion, the former head of government Silvio Berlusconi, at the center of numerous scandals, declared on Wednesday that he hoped to return there during the legislative elections in September. “I think that in the end I will run as a candidate for the Senate, so that all those people who asked me to be finally happy,” the 85-year-old billionaire and media mogul told Rai radio.
After helping to bring down Prime Minister Mario Draghi last month by withdrawing his support, Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party looks set to return to power with elections for MPs and senators scheduled for September 25. He is part of a right-wing coalition dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy, which includes Matteo Salvini’s Anti-Immigration League.
Berlusconi has brushed off reports that he is worried about the possibility of Ms Meloni, whose motto is “God, fatherland and family”, becoming head of government of the eurozone’s third-largest economy. Noting the agreement between them that whoever wins the most votes chooses the prime minister, he said: ‘If it’s Giorgia, I’m sure she’ll be able to carry out this difficult task.’
But he urged voters to back his party as the coalition’s moderate voice, stressing its European and Atlanticist stance. “Each additional vote in favor of Forza Italia will strengthen the moderate and centrist profile of the coalition,” he said in a separate interview published Wednesday in Il Giornale newspaper.
Berlusconi was Italy’s prime minister three times, in the 1990s and 2000s, but dominated public life for much longer at the helm of a vast media and sporting empire.
The Senate expelled him in November 2013 after his conviction for tax evasion, he was banned from participating in a legislative election for six years but he was however elected to the European Parliament in 2019.
Berlusconi, hugely controversial in Italy, is embroiled in numerous trials that have marked his long career, including one where he is accused of having paid guests to lie about his famous “bunga-bunga” parties, orgies organized when he was prime minister.
He has also suffered from a series of health problems, some of which related to his hospitalization for Covid in 2020.