page_title: Silvio Berlusconi
section_title: Berlusconi II cabinet
hierarchical_section_title: Silvio Berlusconi / Political career / Berlusconi II cabinet
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Mercoledì 1° marzo 2006, il Presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi sorride al Vice Presidente Dick Cheney ed al Presidente della Camera dei Rappresentanti USA J. Dennis Hastert come gesto di gratitudine alla calda accoglienza mostratagli dai membri della seduta plenaria del Congresso. English: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi smiles at Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, as he gestures in response to a warm welcome given by members of a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, March 1, 2006.
context_page_description: Silvio Berlusconi is an Italian media tycoon and politician who has served as Prime Minister of Italy in four governments. He was a Member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 2013 and has served as a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, and previously from 1999 to 2001.
  Berlusconi is the controlling shareholder of Mediaset and owned the Italian football club A.C. Milan from 1986 to 2017. He is nicknamed Il Cavaliere for his Order of Merit for Labour, although he voluntarily resigned from this order in March 2014. In 2018, Forbes magazine ranked him as the 190th richest man in the world with a net worth of US$8.0 billion. In 2009, Forbes ranked him 12th in the List of The World's Most Powerful People due to his domination of Italian politics, throughout more than twenty years at the head of the centre-right coalition.
  Berlusconi was Prime Minister for nine years in total, making him the longest serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, and the third longest-serving since Italian unification, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti.
context_section_description: Opposition parties claim Berlusconi was not able to achieve the goals he promised in his Contratto con gli Italiani. Some of his partners in government, especially the National Alliance and the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats, admitted the Government fell short of the promises made in the agreement, attributing the failure to an unforeseeable downturn in global economic conditions. Berlusconi himself consistently asserted that he achieved all the goals of the agreement, and said his Government provided un miracolo continuo (a continuous miracle) that made all 'earlier governments pale' (by comparison). He attributed the widespread failure to recognise these achievements to a campaign of mystification and vilification in the print media, asserting that 85% of newspapers were opposed to him. Luca Ricolfi, an independent analyst, held that Berlusconi had managed to deliver only one promise out of five, the one concerning minimum pension rates. According to Ricolfi, the other four promises were not honoured, in particular the undertakings on tax simplification and crime reduction.
caption: Berlusconi addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 2006
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