From the Mani Pulite Scandal to the Second Republic: How Berlusconi Emerged from a Corrupt System

Simona Rita Anzani and Giacomo Mensi

On 26 January 1994, the history of Italian Politics changed forever: a 57-year-old entrepreneur announced its entrance in the political arena. Silvio Berlusconi was born in 1936 in a bourgeois family, raised in the Isola district of Milan, now symbol of the Milanese “movida”. Known to the public as “Cavaliere”, he “was granted the title Knight of Labour - an order of merit given to entrepreneurs - in the 1970s” according to the BBC. Being a media tycoon with absolute control over Italian private television, he was able to bo win the elections with his newborn party, Forza Italia.

But how did he manage to convince millions of Italians?

Before 1994, Italy had been ruled for more than 50 years by the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. The Mani Pulite scandal swept away the previous political elite.

After the Second World War, Italy was governed under the First Republic, the political system based on the Constitution of 1948. The most important political party was the Christian Democratic Party

(DC): it never ruled alone, but usually collaborated with other parties such as the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian Liberal Party. During these years, the Communist Party was also widely supported by voters, even though it never entered national government due to Cold War dynamics.

The system worked in a peculiar way: governments changed frequently, but the political forces in power remained largely the same. The First Republic was characterized by unstable governments but strong continuity within the ruling class.

It was common for parties to exercise significant influence over public companies, state-owned enterprises, public procurement, local authorities, public appointments, television, banks, and public finance. Politics was not only about representing the population, but also about managing economic and administrative power. Parties needed consensus and large amounts of financial resources to maintain it: funding came partly from legal sources, but illegal financing became increasingly widespread.

A system thus developed in which many companies, in order to obtain public contracts or administrative favors, paid bribes to political parties or their representatives. These were not isolated incidents: over time, this became an almost structural mechanism. This is the core of the problem: corruption was not seen as the deviation of a few individuals, but as a way in which the political system itself functioned.

The term Tangentopoli comes from “tangente” (bribe) and “poli” (city), and was used by journalists to describe the system of corruption that was brought to light by the Mani Pulite investigation. The scandal exploded in 1992, when the Socialist politician Mario Chiesa was arrested in Milan while receiving a bribe from an entrepreneur.

The investigation quickly spread across the entire country: many companies systematically paid bribes to obtain public contracts in exchange for work opportunities, authorizations, and preferential treatment. Entrepreneurs, public officials, regional councillors, mayors, members of parliament, ministers, and party leaders were all involved.

The scandal had a devastating impact on Italy: it undermined trust in the government that had ruled the country for decades, at a time of broader instability caused by the end of the Cold War, an economic crisis, rising public debt, declining trust in political leaders, and the transformation of the Communist Party following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Mani Pulite investigation struck an already fragile system and ultimately led to its collapse, generating an extraordinary media impact, as citizens witnessed how deeply corruption had penetrated the core of politics. Between 1992 and 1994, the Christian Democratic Party was dismantled, and many political leaders were either investigated or lost their credibility.

The Italian political framework of the early 1990s completely collapsed. In this panorama, Berlusconi understood it was his moment to enter the multifaceted political scene. Italians were looking for new political figures, different from the ones they had seen for the past 50 years. Berlusconi was ready. He leveraged his power across multiple fronts: political, economic, and mediatic.

He built his political influence long before entering politics in 1994. From the mid-1970s, he grew closer to a prominent Italian political figure, Bettino Craxi, who became secretary of the Socialist Party (PSI) in 1976. According to l’Espresso, the mediator between the two was Silvano Larini, the right-hand man of Bettino Craxi and an intermediary in the Milanese political context. As reported by the BBC, “Milan was also politically convenient because its mayor was the brother-in-law of the Socialist Premier Bettino Craxi, whose own political base was Milan”.

But why so much interest in Silvio Berlusconi?

Well, “Berlusconi became one of the world's most successful, if not the most successful, super-salesmen of modern times”, as reported by the BBC. Berlusconi's fortune started in his late thirties (1960s), when “he was able to acquire a vast stretch of empty farmland for a low price because, near the main Milan airport, landing planes flew too low overhead”. Ten years a new suburb was born at the gates of Milan: Milano Due. In the newborn city, Berlusconi established his first TV studio. He quickly understood the power television had. According to Forbes, “his fortune climbed in the 1980s as he kept buying up TV stations and expanded across the country”. In ten years, he moved from a local channel, Telemilano, to a three-channel network (Canale 5, Italia 1, Rete 4),challenging the state monopoly of RAI.

The media expansion was part of a wider economic strategy. In 1975, he founded Finvest, a holding company spanning from television, advertising, to publishing and finance. In 1991, the company acquired Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing group. By the early 1990s, he built a “sprawling business empire” as reported by Yahoo Finance, becoming, in the words of the Financial Times, “One of Italy’s wealthiest businessmen and a dominant figure in the media industry”. As explored byProfessor Andrea Tesei, Research Associate of the Centre for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics, Berlusconi’s media network had measurable effects on his later electoral success. His media reached and influenced large portions of the Italian population.

This rapid expansion clashed with Italy’s legislation. As reported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, “private ownership of nationwide broadcasting television stations was illegal in Italy at the time. Berlusconi used his good relations with the then Prime Minister to change the legal situation so that he could retain the majority of his shares in television and radio stations”. In October 1984, Canale 5, Rete 4 and Italia 1 were shut down for illegal national broadcasting. The Prime

MinisterBettino Craxi - who was on a State Visit in London according to il Post - called a meeting of the Council of Ministers for the day of his return. After a long legislative journey of temporary decrees that enabled Berlusconi’s networks to continue broadcasting, the Mammì Law was approved in 1990, bringing a radical change to the world of Italian television: a political framework for private television was established, and the duopoly between RAI and Berlusconi’s networks was stabilised.

However, Berlusconi was not as loyal as his friend Craxi was. According to Forbes, “after a massive corruption scandal brought down Italy’s political class and the country’s main political parties collapsed in the early 1990s, Berlusconi spotted an opportunity to capitalise on his profile. In 1994, he launched the center-right Forza Italia! (Go Italy!) party and won in an upset, securing a majority in parliament with 43% of the vote in a coalition with the right-wing regionalist Northern League party”. Berlusconi used the Tangentopoli scandal to promote, through his network, his political figure as opposed to the corrupt system. On May 11, 1994, Silvio Berlusconi took the oath of office as Prime Minister. This event marked the birth of what the press called the 'Second Republic,' a term used to emphasise the radical shift in the political landscape after the Mani Pulite scandals dismantled the old party establishment.