FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
BERLIN – At the Copenhagen European Council on December 12, 2002, which approved the conclusion of EU accession negotiations for the former Warsaw Pact countries plus Cyprus, Malta and Slovenia, Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder created a tasty little theatre. They had met the night before in Dortmund in the stands of the Westfalenstadion for the Champions League game between Borussia and Milan, which the Rossoneri won 1-0. And now the Chancellor, the biggest fan of the German team, jokingly accused “Silvio” of promising his players a double bonus in the break between the first and second half when he went into the dressing room annoyed by their poor performance : ” Just because you won,” commented Schröder.
Tony Blair, watching the exchange, rolled his eyes and asked Berlusconi: “Silvio, do you really own this club?” He nodded, almost surprised by the question. To which the British Prime Minister exploded, “So why the hell are you wasting your time on us?” Why the hell are you wasting your time on us? In this way, Silvio Berlusconi’s relationships with many of the international leaders known during the long years of his rule were formed.
– Berlusconi with then British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie in Porto Rotondo in August 2004
In and out of politics, a mix of intimacy and male complicity, testosterone rivalry and goliardy. As at the Naples summit in July 1994, the first G8 summit with Yeltsin’s Russia, after dinner at the Palace of Caserta, the heads of state and government met with their wives in the park in front of the spectacle of the Dolphin Fountain. There, Bill Clinton romantically sided with Hillary, who lazily exclaimed, “Wonderful.” “Let’s calm down, otherwise we’ll increase the offspring tonight,” commented the mischievous Berlusconi and made the American president laugh.
– The G8 in Naples in 1994
It was at the same summit that when he had to go to the toilet, he realized that Francois Mitterrand would do the same: “The elderly first,” he said, eliciting from the French president, who never chose the knight, a smile between contempt for his free-range joviality and admiration for the Coté-Ribalt and entrepreneurial spirit.
– Berlusconi and Putin in February 2003
Berlusconi’s greatest international political success is tied to Putin’s creation of the NATO-Russia Council at the Pratica di Mare summit in 2022, which was then distorted by Moscow’s neo-imperial and aggressive backtracking. With George W. Bush, Iraq was condemned when Berlusconi allied Italy in favor of war with the “new Europe” in 2003, first trying to get the White House chief to stall but then refusing to follow the anti-American drift of France and Germany.
– Bush greets Berlusconi at his ranch in Texas, July 2003
The reward came in 2006, when Berlusconi was campaigning and Bush invited him to Washington for a state visit with full honors, including a speech to the assembled chambers. Berlusconi elicited a five standing ovation from Congress when he recounted the anecdote from Anzio, where as a boy his father would have taken him to visit the American military cemetery to remind him of his role as the liberator of US soldiers. When it wasn’t true, it was very well received.
At the other extreme of compatibility with Berlusconi are two other giants of world politics over the past twenty years: Barack Obama and Angela Merkel. The first was all wrong from the start, with Italy’s prime minister twice calling the newly elected first African-American president of the United States “handsome and tanned,” before insisting in a press conference that he said it made sense, considering , who at that moment (sic) was “thinking of Naomi Campbell”.
– Berlusconi arriving at the G20 dinner in Pittsburgh, greeted by Barack and Michelle Obama, September 2009
Since then, Obama has kept his personal distance, especially after Berlusconi’s somewhat vulgar gesture of appreciation to his wife Michelle at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. This did not stop the US President from praising Italy and its Prime Minister for their service in Afghanistan in the interview he gave me in the Oval Office in July 2010.
The relationship with Angela Merkel was complex. “She had great respect for him as a businessman and politician, and at least initially she trusted his judgments,” a former aide to the chancellor told me, “but she couldn’t stand his patriarchal behavior and his constant jokes,” or almost sexual background. And then there was the question of the gifts that Berlusconi continued to bring her, which she found very embarrassing, since she always explained to him that she could not legally accept them.”
Even the Berlusconi camp remains divided on whether or not Merkel was actively involved in the plot to kill him. Some time after Berlusconi’s resignation, Merkel said in an interview with some European colleagues: “Berlusconi didn’t have it easy.” But I worked with him. He gave opening and closing speeches at the European Councils, but in between he accepted everything. it was ok Only at the end did it turn into a catastrophe.”
– At the NATO summit in Bade Baden in spring 2009, the chancellor was waiting for Berlusconi while the then prime minister was on the phone with Erdogan
But the moments when Merkel was most annoyed with Berlusconi were due to misunderstandings. The first is that the knight probably never uttered the “big ass lockable” insult that stuck in his memory. The second case occurred at the NATO summit in Baden-Baden in spring 2009, when an impatient Chancellor waited several minutes for Berlusconi, who, instead of going to the entrance where she was waiting for him, had retreated to the riverbank to call demand. Annoyed, Merkel went off to lead the other leaders across the Rhine Bridge, where they met halfway through French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who also never got along with Berlusconi.
Berlusconi, who was still on the phone, was not there. In fact, it was learned that evening that he was speaking to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of the leaders with whom he has always had excellent personal relations, and was trying to persuade him to accept the appointment of Denmark’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO Secretary General . Which the knight would later describe as “more beautiful than Cacciari”. The mediation went well.
– The “famous” Merkel-Sarkozy press conference of October 2011
At the beginning of the Berlusconi era, there was no friendship with Helmut Kohl, but a relationship of convenience. During the Black Funds scandal, which forever tarnished the reunification chancellor’s reputation, the knight was included among the CDU’s possible hidden financiers, whose name Kohl never mentioned. In a conversation with journalists in Strasbourg, Berlusconi himself let slip the joke: “Do you know how much cabbage costs us?”
It is a fact that Helmut Kohl was instrumental in opening the doors of the European People’s Party to Forza Italia, but it must be said here that the Chancellor’s political interest was very strong: “I have spent my whole life fighting against the fighting socialists,” Kohl told an Italian friend who asked him why he was open to Berlusconi. With him I will have the majority in the European Parliament. But in the PSA I only count».