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Italy

Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi is an Italian media tycoon and politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy in four governments from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 and 2008 to 2011; making him the longest serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, and the third longest-serving since Italian unification, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti.
Berlusconi was the leader of the centre-right party Forza Italia from 1994 to 2009, and its successor party The People of Freedom from 2009 to 2013.
He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 2013 and has served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019, and previously from 1999 to 2001.
Berlusconi is the controlling shareholder of Mediaset and owned the Italian football club A.C. Milan from 1986 to 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Political_positions

Berlusconi defines himself as liberal, and a free trader, but he is often also described as a populist or a conservative, mainly due to his tough anti-communist propaganda.
Besides his discriminative political approach, that brought to hate campaigns pro-/contra-him; he has been object of 23 judicial investigations, mostly for corruption or accusations to links to the Mafia.

However, the main features that depict Berlusconi as a prominent figure of the socalled “illiberal democracies” towards authoritarian drifts concern his worship of the person, the threat to the separation of democratic powers through his reforms of justice, the standing conflict of interests.
Last but not least, he was nicknamed the “black knight” for his endorsement to members of postfascist National Alliance (AN), whose party takes part to all his governments, relaunching a nationalist and xenophobic agenda and boosting new far-right movements, such as Casapound Italy.