Can anyone beat Berlusconi to the Italian presidency?

Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi was a populist before the word became all the rage. An almost comically divisive figure, he makes spectacular off-the-cuff remarks which thrill his supporters and leave his enemies apoplectic. He called Barack Obama ‘tanned’. He advised a teenage girl that her best bet in life was to ‘marry a rich man’, and once said it is ‘better to stare at pretty girls than be gay’. In an interview with Boris Johnson and me in The Spectator in 2003, he insisted that the fascist dictator Mussolini did not kill his opponents, merely ‘sent them on holiday to the islands’. I wonder if Boris remembers that now.

Still, unlike the current British prime minister, Silvio’s political fortunes appear to be in the ascendancy again in 2022. For he will replace the outgoing Sergio Mattarella as Italy’s president if the election, which begins on 24 January, goes his way. His resurgence would cause an almighty freak-out among the European establishment, which thought it had successfully exorcised him from the high offices of state when it forced him to resign as prime minister in a palace coup in 2011. Berlusconi, who has been a Euro MP since 2019, provokes in opponents the same visceral hatred as Donald Trump does.

Italian presidents, whose powers are largely but by no means exclusively ceremonial and who serve for seven years, are elected by the 951 deputies and senators in parliament, plus 58 regional delegates. And Il Cavaliere (the Knight) — as his supporters call him — may turn out to be the only candidate with the necessary numbers.

Certainly, Italy’s powerful left-wing press is getting molto agitato. The weekly L’Espresso has dedicated its entire current issue — whose cover proclaims in huge letters ‘Lui No’ (Not him) — to explaining, in dense page after dense page, why Berlusconi must be stopped.