What Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi have in common

DONALD Trump ended his victory speech with the words: “And I love this country. Thank you.” A fondness for fervently patriotic declarations is just one of many similarities between America’s president-elect and another billionaire who made his fortune from real estate before turning to politics.

In 1994, Silvio Berlusconi pioneered a new form of conservative populism when he announced his intention to run for prime minister in a televised address that began: “Italy is the country that I love.”

Both portrayed themselves as an alternative to mainstream politics. And convincingly so. Mr Trump won in the teeth of opposition from much of his party’s leadership. Mr Berlusconi created a party of his own in months and appointed executives from his advertising firm to top positions within it.

Both men have legendarily huge egos, a fondness for locker-room bragging and, while protesting their love of women, seem to judge them solely on their physical attributes. Both men have been involved in sex scandals.

Like Mr Trump, Italy’s former prime minister–still the leader of a sizeable party—uses plain, earthy language that resonates with traditionally left-wing, working-class voters. Like the Republican candidate, Mr Berlusconi was never one to let the facts get in the way of a vote-catching assertion.

But does his record in office offer any clues to what Americans can expect after Mr Trump moves into the White House? Though the real-state tycoon turned reality-television star is 13 years older than Mr Berlusconi was when he first took office, one answer could be longevity. By the time he lost power in 2011, Mr Berlusconi had become the longest-serving prime minister in the history of the Italian republic—albeit in non-consecutive terms.

Like Mr Trump, Mr Berlusconi enjoyed significant backing from the far right; from a recast version of Italy’s neo-fascist party; and from the Northern League, which, though initially moderate, became steadily more xenophobic and protectionist in the 1990s. Italy’s former prime minister certainly presided over the introduction of some radically conservative measures, notably in the areas of immigration and employment. But what distinguished his leadership was not so much extremism as his failure to achieve his stated goals and his intense personalisation of the country’s government.

When he began his political career, Mr Berlusconi was Italy’s richest man. Many of his supporters, like Mr Trump’s, hoped he could bring his Midas touch to the economy as a whole. Mr Berlusconi did nothing to disabuse them of that idea. He was re-elected in 2001 after a campaign in which he promised voters a new “economic miracle” and distributed a glossy account of his own inexorable rise to fortune and fame.

Yet his years in office were characterised by modest economic growth, interspersed with periods of stagnation and recession. By the end of his final term in 2011, Italians were poorer in real terms than they had been when he regained power ten years earlier. If there is a lesson for Americans to be drawn from the Berlusconi decade, it is that success as a businessman is no guarantee of the ability to manage an economy.

Where Mr Berlusconi did succeed was in passing copious volumes of legislation that favoured his own interests. By one count, his governments introduced more than 30 so-called ad personam laws that helped his businesses or shielded him from indictment or conviction by the prosecutors and judges who he argued were hounding him.

Mr Trump may not be able or willing to act similarly, but he may find it tempting to indulge in another form of personalisation that became a speciality of the Italian former prime minister: that of diplomacy. Mr Berlusconi was convinced he could foster Italy’s interests with the same deal-making skills that had made him rich. Never much at ease with his EU peers, he found his talents worked best with dictators like Muammar Qaddafi and the leaders of “illiberal democracies” such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin.

It can be argued no real harm came of the man-to-man chats of which Mr Berlusconi was so fond. But it is one thing for the prime minister of Italy to cosy up to the Kremlin, and quite another for the American president to do so. After all, he is the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger.