Silvio Berlusconi suffering from leukaemia, doctors say

Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is suffering from leukaemia, his doctor revealed on Thursday, as the 86-year-old remained in intensive care for a second day undergoing treatment for a lung infection.

Berlusconi, who was Italy’s longest-serving postwar prime minister, was admitted to the intensive care unit of Milan’s San Raffaele Hospital on Wednesday.

His personal physician, Alberto Zangrillo, said in a Thursday statement that Berlusconi had been diagnosed some time ago with chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia — or blood cancer — leaving him highly vulnerable to such infections.

“Berlusconi is in intensive care to treat a lung infection,” the statement said. “The infection has come in the context of a chronic blood condition [from] which he has been suffering for some time.”

News of the leukaemia diagnosis — which the normally ebullient Berlusconi had concealed until now — has stunned Italy, a country that he had held in his thrall since he burst on to the political scene at 57 with the launch of the Forza Italia (“Go, Italy”) party in 1994. He was sworn in as prime minister just two months later.

Despite his advanced years, recurring health problems and his many legal troubles, Berlusconi has remained active in Italian politics.

His personality-centric Forza Italia is a remnant of its former self, having won just 8 per cent of the vote in last year’s general elections, but Berlusconi’s grouping is an important component of Meloni’s three-party rightwing coalition.

Forza Italia said on Thursday morning that Berlusconi had spoken to party leaders, including foreign minister Antonio Tajani, on the telephone and had “sent his loving greetings and recommended maximum commitment to the Parliament, the government and the party, because the nation needs us”.

However, in his own television appearance on state broadcaster RAI, Tajani said: “We can’t talk to him because he is in intensive care, but the message he has given us is to work.”

Berlusconi has been repeatedly hospitalised in recent years as he battled major health problems, starting with major heart surgery in 2016. In September 2020 he contracted Covid-19 while on holiday at his villa in Sardinia and became severely ill from the virus, which he later called “the most dangerous challenge” he had ever faced.

Berlusconi was hospitalised for a few days last month, though little information was released. After returning home, he tweeted that “I have already returned to work on the themes of these days, ready and determined to commit myself, as I always have, to the country I love.”

Despite his health problems, Berlusconi — who recently held a faux nuptial ceremony with his 33-year-old fiancée — has not laid out any clear succession plan for Forza Italia, which many believe could implode without his unifying presence.

Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome