Silvia Marchetti is a Rome-based freelance reporter. She covers finance, economics, travel and culture for a wide range of media including CNN, Newsweek, MNI News, The Daily Mail and The Guardian. Silvia has a masters degree in journalism, fluently speaks four languages and has lived abroad most of her life.

ROME—Italians have always looked to the American political stage with a sense of expectation, even reverence, as a near-at-hand dream populated by modern leaders, creative public policies and wildly futuristic campaigns. Whether or not Americans realize it, their country has, for decades, been a political trendsetter in Europe. But today, with a Donald Trump nomination looking increasingly plausible, a new feeling has crept in here: a queasy sense of déjà vu.

As Trump’s campaign has cut its surprising swath across the American electorate, the Italian press and political observers have noticed very familiar echoes in Trump’s populist-nationalist rhetoric, his opulent machismo and the cult of personality based on the image of the self-made man. There’s also the womanizing; the harsh-to-violent tone; the ability to appeal to ordinary citizens from a lofty and velvet-covered perch. This time, it appears, the political trend started on our side of the Atlantic: Donald Trump is an American Silvio Berlusconi. And in a nation still reeling from its political affair with a billionaire playboy, experts are warning voters across the Atlantic not to take the risks lightly.


A media tycoon known for his lavish lifestyle, Berlusconi made a late-career pivot from business to politics, winning four terms as Italy’s prime minister during the 1990s and 2000s. Like Trump, he presented himself as an anti-politician, a man of business who could free his country from evil—promising to use his privilege and power to cut through the red tape that had made generations of Italians cynical about government.

Trump is “just like Berlusconi,” said Giovanni Orsina, director at the Rome-based Luiss University School of Government. “The outsider billionaire who talks to people’s stomachs rather than their reason, knowing what they want to hear, and thinking that a nation can be successfully run like any business. … They say politically incorrect things that appeal to [the] common man; that’s their pull.”

The political incorrectness, in both cases, even extends to invoking Benito Mussolini. Trump caused a minor brouhaha by retweeting a Mussolini line that had been shared by a Twitter user named @ilduce2016. Many Italians familiar with the adage—“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” it read—were surprised to learn it was a Mussolini quotation. But they weren’t surprised to see the dictator invoked. To an extent that would shock Americans, the fascist dictator’s reputation is alive and well in Italy; indeed, Berlusconi frequently talked about Mussolini’s “positive accomplishments” in Italian history, and even defended a few of the tyrant's misdoings, including having shipped all his opponents to prison atolls. (Berlusconi held that it wasn’t confinement, but “holidaying”). “At times, I really do regret not being a dictator,” Berlusconi once said while praising himself, in a notably Trumpian moment. “But alas, I am not.”

The Italian experience suggests that Trump’s American voters should be careful what they ask for. Once in office, the reality of Prime Minister Berlusconi was quite different than what candidate Berlusconi had pledged. The cornerstone of his campaign had been the slogan “less taxes for everyone” and an assurance that his government would never put “its hands into Italians’ pockets.” But during his administration, Italy’s overall tax rate rose, hitting 54 percent in 2013, the highest level in Europe. As a candidate, he had promised to solve the country’s homelessness problems; once in office, he cut funds for public housing.

In 2002, he passed a controversial immigration law that envisaged the forced repatriation of all refugees back to their home countries. And he forged a political alliance with Italy’s former fascist party, as well as with the xenophobic populist Northern League—an organization with a leader who suggested shooting at all migrant boats landing on Italian soil in Lampedusa.

Over nine years, Berlusconi ended up driving the country to the edge of a Greece-style debt crisis while never giving up the lifestyle he’d enjoyed as a private citizen—womanizing, throwing the sex parties that brought the phrase “bunga bunga” into headlines, and ultimately facing trial for tax fraud.

“Berlusconi revealed himself a great campaign manager, but a terrible man of government,” says Orsina. “His flamboyant promises never met up to expectations. His idea of politics as showbiz was a failure.”

Even worse was his exit from the political stage in 2011, when the whole of Europe urged him to step down after a series of corruption trials, allegations of sex with underage girls, and wild affairs with starlets and prostitutes at his government’s headquarters. (“Bunga bunga parties,” one underage participant called them, creating a catch-all phrase for Berlusconi’s escapades.) Berlusconi’s tendency for self-indulgence ended in international humiliation for Italy.

New Window Is This What a Trump Presidency Would Look Like? Photos of some of the most outrageous moments of Berlusconi's prime ministership. (Click to view gallery.) | Getty

It’s not hard to imagine a Trump presidency ending similarly for America—not just with personal embarrassment, but with carnage in the political system. A recent editorial in Il Fatto Quotidiano, an influential daily newspaper based in Rome, likened Trump in 2016 to Berlusconi 20 years ago: “a threat to democracy because he’s not a politician, but a brand—a parasite that destroys the political establishment through self-marketing and advertisement techniques. The risk is: after Trump, there’s only Trump.”

Nearly all of Italy’s papers lean center-left, and they’ve struck a similar tone, cautioning against Trump’s rise, and fretting over his potential presidency. The only paper that appears to defend Trump is Il Giornale, which is owned by Berlusconi’s family. The outlet extensively reports on the Republican Party’s internal fighting, and delights in the growing consensus that Trump will be the nominee (“The more he resists friendly fire, the more he wins,” read one article’s title).

The parallels between Trump and Berlusconi are being watched by the public as well as the pundit class. “Berlusconi and Trump have the power to touch raw nerves and split a nation,” says Alberto Bianchi, a banker in Turin, adding a word of warning: “Verbal leads to physical violence.” “You know what Berlusconi really did?,” asks Mirella Fabi, a shopkeeper in Rome. “He rose to power only to pursue his own economic interests, passed ad-personam laws and ended up bringing starlets and prostitutes into parliament and government. He’s a con man who fooled us all.”

Trump hasn’t yet held any kind of office, making it impossible to know how his words will translate into action. But even for his own party, the example carries a warning. Italy’s post-Berlusconi political right is fragmented and broken. “There’s no doubt that the GOP is at a crossroads,” says Davide Borsani, a research fellow with ISPI, an international-affairs think tank in Milan. “The whole point is whether Trump will turn out to be an element of renewal or not. Back in the 1990s, Berlusconi’s rise marked the end of Italy’s first republic, and the birth of the second one. … Twenty years, we can all see the results of this.”

And although Berlusconi is the closest Italian parallel to Trump, he’s not the only one. Less well-known to outsiders is another deliberately clownish Italian populist politician who gave birth to a hard-to-categorize political movement. In 2009, Beppe Grillo, a former comedian, created a political party from scratch. He refused to step into Parliament as a deputy, instead enlisting people from civil society, manipulating them from the outside, and firing them if they disobeyed his wishes.

Grillo’s promises turned out to be vain, like Berlusconi’s. His movement, the Five-Star Party, pledged to overthrow the old political establishment and inject Parliament with an element of “novelty” by sending home old senators and deputies. Grillo promised a "new" Italy, but has never defined a plan for it nor taken any action; his members of Parliament simply quarrel aimlessly—both with other parties and even among themselves. In 2013, when Prime Minister Matteo Renzi rose to power, he asked Grillo to join forces with him and change Italy. Grillo rudely walked out of the meeting room and refused the possibility of a coalition without even listening to Renzi's government agenda.

“Grillo is another guy who had the chance to really change Italy’s political system, but failed,” says Fabi, the shopkeeper. “All he does is criticize, attack everyone and destroy everything without proposing sound alternatives. He yells and laughs. He’s just a joker, that’s all.” That may well be true of Donald Trump, too, but nobody is laughing.