Paulo Rangel considers that Silvio Berlusconi was a forerunner of the media attention that today is possible to observe in politicians like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro.
“Berlusconi showed in the 1990s, and then in the first decade of the 2000s, something we see today: in the case of leaders (…) like Bolsonaro, we see that, despite the constant accusations, there is a base of support that never fails to show itself.
“The most impressive”, highlights Paulo Rangel in statements to TSFit is that in the case of Berlusconi he was involved in judicial scandals and in his private life that “would have ended the career of any other politician.”
“So, in that sense, it is indeed a harbinger of what comes next,” says the Portuguese MEP.
For Paulo Rangel, the former Italian Prime Minister knew how to take advantage of marketing for his own benefit. “There is no doubt that he clearly anticipated the movement that everyone understands today, but that in the 1990s was far from materializing: a policy highly focused on marketing a charismatic and popular figure, very immune to scandals of all kinds, capable of overcoming a center-right electorate, and sometimes even a more accentuated right-wing electorate, and at the same time attracting a lot of people disillusioned with politics, that is, creating a kind of hope in a rupture project.” .
In addition, after the “clean hands operation” in Italy, which exposed corruption networks associated with the mafia and even the Vatican, Berlusconi “seized the opportunity to emerge with a kind of D. Sebastião.”
Sílvio Berlusconi was an MEP, between 2019 and 2022, but the Social Democrat Paulo Rangel acknowledges that he had little to do with the former Italian prime minister, since he rarely or never went to the European Parliament.
“Berlusconi appeared very rarely in the European Parliament and every time he appeared, he practically always appeared accompanied by televisions, he never appeared alone,” says Paulo Rangel. “In addition to missing basically all the meetings, the few times he went to the plenary sessions – and only to the plenary sessions – he didn’t even interact with his colleagues. He himself was a figure, let’s say, with the court of him. He made a few media appearances, but without any interaction with colleagues.”
These years were also marked by successive hospitalizations: in 2019 the Italian MEP underwent surgery for intestinal obstruction and in September 2020 he contracted Covid-19 followed by hospitalizations associated with various sequelae of the disease, such as respiratory infections.
Despite no longer having a prominent place in active Italian politics, Silvio Berlusconi still held sway in the Forza Italia party, which is part of Italy’s ruling coalition. Paulo Rangel considers, therefore, that the death of the former Italian prime minister “will cause a very big readjustment of Italian politics”, where “the votes were always essentially personal”, he considers.
Silvio Berlusconi died this Monday at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, since Friday, due to pneumonia derived from leukemia that he had suffered for several years. He was 86 years old.
Source: TSF
