In Silvio Berlusconi’s words: Offensive quotes and gaffes

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister who has died after several bouts of ill health, was renown outside politics for his sex and propriety scandals and business empires.

A flamboyant figure until the end, he was rarely out of the headlines.‘Only Napoleon did more than I have done’: On politics
“I am the Jesus Christ of politics,” Berlusconi told his supporters in 2006, according to Italian media. “I am a patient victim. I put up with everyone. I sacrifice myself for everyone.”

He also compared himself to the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte that same year.

“Only Napoleon did more than I have done,” he told an Italian TV talk show. “But I am definitely taller.”‘Putin sent me 20 bottles of vodka’: On Russia and Ukraine
In October, despite anger in the West over Russia’s war in Ukraine, Berlusconi stood by his old friend President Vladimir Putin and said: “Putin for my birthday sent me 20 bottles of vodka and a very sweet letter. I replied with bottles of Lambrusco and an equally sweet letter.”

Separately, Berlusconi also reportedly admonished Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni for meeting with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy after blaming Kyiv for the Russian invasion.

Goading and insulting world leaders
During a group photograph at an informal European Union summit in Spain in 2002, Berlusconi raised two fingers behind the head of the Spanish foreign minister, Josep Pique, in the traditional Latin gesture for a cuckold.

In 2005, Berlusconi said he had tried to charm Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen, to give up her country’s claim to host the new European Food Safety Authority.In 2010, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel was also insulted by Berlusconi when he called her an “unf******e lardarse”, according to Italian newspapers.

He also told German lawmaker and Social Democrat Martin Schulz: “There is in Italy a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I would like to suggest you for the role of kapo. You’d be perfect.”

A kapo was a concentration camp inmate who was given privileges for supervising prisoner work gangs.

Racist jibe
The Italian leader’s interactions with Barack Obama started when the United States senator won the presidential election in 2008 and Berlusconi called the victor “handsome, young and also suntanned”.

Offensive in a crisis
While visiting survivors of an earthquake in the central Italian region of Abruzzo in 2009, Berlusconi said of the people in emergency tents: “They should look at it as a weekend of camping.”