Best known for his perma-tan, gaffes, “bunga bunga” parties and outsized ego, Silvio Berlusconi was a proto-Trumpian populist, the man to beat in Rome for more than two decades, and one of European politics’ most controversial figures.
Italy’s longest-serving postwar prime minister, Berlusconi, who has died aged 86, held the job on three occasions, amassing along the way a fortune ranked by Forbes magazine last year as the country’s fourth-biggest.
Skilled in the art of not just weathering scandal but emerging from
