Faced with the European north of Protestant matrix, where only effort and without error define a life, Mediterranean countries tend to suffer from a common defect: envy. When someone has achieved success, it is said that they have achieved it through fraudulent means, that they are a despot with those who collaborate with them, that they are selfish who do not stop until they get what they want or that they leave no one behind them. In short: that it lacks a solid and coherent set of values. Hence, most of what has been published about Silvio Berlusconi has been nothing more than caricatures about one of the central figures in Italian public life.
The panegyrics and criticisms that these days illustrate any of the different lives in which Berlusconi has lived forget, as in Citizen Kane, the essential: his childhood and his youth. Silvino was born in Isola, a middle-class neighborhood in entrepreneurial Milan, the same year Jorge Bergoglio was born in another middle-class neighborhood but in thriving Buenos Aires. The two studied at the Salesians, the first at the Salesian Lyceum Sant’Ambrogio, the second Wilfrid Barón de los Santos Ángeles College. From there was born his vitality, spontaneity, creativity, camaraderie and, above all, empathy. During his school years he sold his brilliant notes to his classmates and met his best friend, Fedele Confalonieri, who has accompanied him throughout his life. They both started playing the piano and singing on cruise ships.
He was a brilliant student. After graduating in Law from the University of Milan, with the highest grade and special award, he was Associate Professor in Commercial Law at his alma mater. He read a lot, which made him a very cultured person, who quoted both the classics and the contemporaries. A little-known detail was the year he spent at the Sorbonne, after which he became a great expert in social market economy, to the point that he was a great friend of Vera Lutz, the German economist who promoted that trend. . The image of an ignorant Berlusconi is an absolute mystification, the product of the aforementioned envy and the banality of so many analysts, who confuse closeness with stupidity.
There are four stages in his professional life: construction, communication, sports and politics. Quite the opposite of many politicians, who pass into the private sector through the revolving door. The creativity of the school led him to see on television the structuring means of leisure that he had known in his childhood in the Salesian theater, which in Spain he has given from José Sacristán to Millán Salcedo. And there he knew how to break the public monopoly on television with the ingenious idea of ??making thousands of local television stations broadcast the same content at the same time. That same innovation made him turn Milan into five times European champions and be the president of the government that has lasted the longest in office in the 20th century.
Berlusconi was impressed by his speed of reasoning, with which in a few minutes he made him identify what was the center of the problem and what could be the solution. He was both analytical and synthetic, empathic and likeable. Hence, he knew, by way of the barrel of honey, de-escalate situations and get into the pocket from Putin to Gaddafi. He had a formidable memory, especially for numbers. In fact, he always reasoned with numbers, in any field, which has nothing to do with being calculating.
Other current commentators will speak abundantly of the difficult moments of his life, from separation to the judiciary. This attentive observer of the human condition knows that he never consciously did harm. From his Salesian education he was left with a deep feeling of never hating anyone, even his worst enemies (and he had them all his life), simply because living with resentment makes no sense, nor does living with envy lead to happiness. He was the gifted son of the European post-war middle class through whose efforts we now have the welfare state. He had a dream and he chased it. And the world belongs to those who, as Pla said, dream with their feet on the ground.
