Just in time to celebrate his 86th birthday, former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi is making his return to Italy’s parliament, winning a seat in the Senate nearly a decade after being banned from holding public office over a tax fraud conviction.Berlusconi, who has made personal comebacks a hallmark of Italian politics for three decades, was re-elected to Italy’s upper house with more than 50% of the votes Sunday in the northern city of Monza, where he also owns a soccer team that was recently promoted to Italy’s top division.While overall his party lost ground compared with the 2018 general elections, it fared better than expected and Berlusconi’s victory was particularly heartfelt.“Regaining a seat in the Senate was a sort of personal revenge for Berlusconi, after all the judicial problems he went through,” said Massimiliano Panarari, political analyst at Rome’s Mercatorum University.In 2013, the Senate expelled Berlusconi because of a tax fraud conviction stemming from his media business, and he was banned from holding public office for six years. After he served a sentence of community service, a court ruled he could once again hold public office and he won a seat in the European Parliament in 2019.His third and last premiership had ended abruptly in 2011, when financial markets lost confidence that the billionaire media magnate could manage Italy’s finances during Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia centre-right party — which pioneered populist politics in Italy in the 1990s — gained just over 8% in Sunday’s vote, which dominated by his ally Giorgia Meloni. She is now poised to lead the country’s first far-right government since World War II.It was a better-than-expected result for Forza Italia, even though it still amounted to a significant loss of support compared with the 14% of the votes it nailed in 2018 elections. The party has grown weaker in recent years, hit by Berlusconi’s judicial woes and his recurring health problems, but it has remained relevant enough.Beating expectations, Forza Italia finished right behind its other ally, the anti-immigrant League of Matteo Salvini, which won only about 9% of the vote, down from 17% in 2018.Berlusconi has pledged to exercise a moderating influence over the other two more radical parties in the centre-right coalition.