Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party has gained about 4 percentage points since relaunching his Facebook page in October, according to the Bloomberg Composite of election polls.
One Monday morning just before Christmas, Silvio Berlusconi walked into an elegant salon at his home near Milan to complete the preparations for a major shift in political strategy.
Beneath a grand oil painting of the Italian aristocrat who once owned his villa in Arcore, long-time advisers and outside specialists were huddled round a table discussing Facebook and Twitter, according to senior members of his campaign team. Projecting laptop data onto a large screen, the team talked the 81-year-old TV mogul through likes, followers and potential lines of attack as they put the finishing touches to a three-month project to transform his campaign.
Six years after he was forced from office at the height of the financial crisis, Berlusconi is back. And though the four-time premier is banned from public office himself, he could still control the next government from behind the scenes, after leveraging the social media that helped bring Donald Trump to power in the U.
“We have to reach as many people as we can,” said 50-year-old Sestino Giacomoni, who’s worked for Berlusconi throughout his time in government and opposition. “And that means social media as well as TV.”
Berlusconi is changing his approach after almost a quarter century in politics to take on a new force. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement didn’t even exist when he won his last election in 2008. Now it’s leading polls for the March 4 vote after an Internet-based campaign that mobilized disaffected voters and the young.
“It’s true that Five Star beat us to the web,” Giacomoni said. “But we’re catching up fast.”
Berlusconi has about a million likes on Facebook and 20,000 followers on Twitter, compared with about 1.2 million and 265,000 respectively for Five Star candidate Luigi Di Maio. Beppe Grillo, the comedian who co-founded Five Star in 2009 and is still politically active, has 2 million likes and 2.
All the same, the strategy is starting to pay off. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party has gained about 4 percentage points since relaunching his Facebook page in October, according to the Bloomberg Composite of election polls. As a result, he’s edging aside Northern League leader Matteo Salvini as leader of the Italian center-right.
Five Star still leads Forza Italia by 27 percent to 16 percent, but the three-party center-right coalition Berlusconi has forged is on track to become the biggest bloc with 35 percent. His campaign team estimates it could claim a working majority if it exceeds 40 percent.
“Berlusconi is unbeatable at aggregating everything that can be aggregated,” said Roberto Weber, chairman of pollster Ixe Institute. “He is the best campaigner and the most effective communicator.”
His appeal against a ban on holding public office stemming from a 2013 tax-fraud conviction most likely won’t be decided on in time for the election. Instead, he aims to influence events from behind the scenes, to deliver tax cuts and new jobs, and to push back against European Union rules.
Even if the center-right doesn’t win a majority, Berlusconi could well have the biggest say over who becomes prime minister. Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, has been touted as Berlusconi’s preferred choice, though he might also accept the current center-left prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, as a compromise.
“If anything, from outside, I’ll be able to be the director,” he said last week in an interview on Canale 5, a television station that is part of the Berlusconi empire. “That’s a big word—I’ll make suggestions and above all keep a close watch to ensure the center-right government carries out our program.”
Berlusconi remains in his element on TV and supplements his social media presence with several talk show appearances a week. When his three-car motorcade arrived at the Canale 5 studio near Rome’s Colosseum last week, he’d already had his make-up done.
On air, he joked about how students and seniors visiting the botanical museum at his summer villa in Sardinia had stolen his entire crop of a Viagra-style herb.
“They took it all,” he grinned. “They didn’t leave even a blade of grass.”
But the campaigner who used to draw crowds so large he’d block traffic has cut back on large-scale public events. His advisers, who asked not to be named discussing his strategy, said his age and health, as well as new limits on party financing, were behind the shift. Berlusconi had a pacemaker since 2006 and had heart surgery in 2016.
Nevertheless, he’s been working for 16 to 18 hours a day since campaigning began in January and sleeping only three or four hours a night, according to Giacomoni.
Although he doesn’t use a cellphone—aides say his phone has been tapped thousands of times during past court probes—Berlusconi’s team uses iPads to show him draft posts for Facebook and Twitter as he looks to position himself as the antithesis of Five Star. He wants to know which posts generated the most interest—good or bad—and offers feedback on both text and graphics. Everything that goes out has had his personal input, Giacomoni says.
“People are going for Berlusconi as a moderate,” Weber said. “He’s the best-known, calmest, most coherent and most reassuring leader.”
— With assistance by Zoe Schneeweiss.
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