Global Courant 2023-05-19 19:16:39
The leader of Forza Italia returns home after 45 days of treatment for a lung infection linked to chronic leukemia.
Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been released from a hospital in Milan, where he was admitted more than six weeks ago with a lung infection linked to leukemia.
The 86-year-old billionaire media magnate left San Raffaele Hospital on Friday without comment.
Italian media showed footage and photos of Berlusconi being driven away in a dark limousine shortly after 1pm (23:00 GMT), smiling and waving to reporters waiting outside the hospital.
Berlusconi was admitted on April 5 and spent the first week and a half in intensive care before being transferred to a normal ward.
Although he rarely appears in public, Berlusconi is currently a senator and president of his right-wing party Forza Italia (Forward Italy), a junior partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government.
Meloni visited him in hospital on Sunday and said afterwards he was “in a great mood” and was still working “tirelessly”.
An image of the Virgin Mary was placed next to a Forza Italia party logo outside the ‘San Raffaele’ hospital where Berlusconi was hospitalized (Nicola Marfisi/Reuters)
“Go Silvio,” she said on Twitter on Friday. “We are waiting for you in the field, to fight many battles together”.
He has also been visited by his deputy from Forza Italia, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, and coalition partner Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration party Lega (League).
“Welcome home, great Silvio,” Salvini tweeted on Friday, while Tajani told Berlusconi on Twitter: “We are all glad you returned home.”
Video address
The former prime minister had hoped to be discharged in time for a Forza Italia convention in Milan earlier this month, but ended up videolinking a closing statement from his hospital room.
Smartly dressed and sitting behind a desk with his party’s banner and the Italian flag behind him, he thanked the members for their support, “which above all helped me overcome a very dangerous pneumonia”.
Forza Italia activists watch Berlusconi talk in his video address at a party convention in Milan (File: Luca Bruno/AP)
Berlusconi served as prime minister three times between 1994 and 2011, but dominated Italian public life for much longer, as a businessman and media mogul and through his ownership of the AC Milan football club.
His career has also been plagued by scandal and legal woes, which have centered on litigation related to his infamous “Bunga Bunga” sex parties over the last 10 years.
‘The Hardest Trial’
His health is also increasingly worrying him.
Berlusconi spent 11 days in hospital for COVID-related pneumonia in September 2020, after contracting the virus while on holiday in Sardinia. He described it as “possibly the most difficult ordeal of my life”.
After being admitted for treatment for a lung infection last month, doctors revealed he had “chronic myelomonocytic leukemia,” a rare form of blood cancer.
The disease, which mainly affects older adults, begins in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and then enters the blood.
Berlusconi’s cancer was in an “ongoing chronic phase” and had not yet progressed to “acute leukemia,” the doctors said.
In March, Berlusconi was admitted to the same hospital in Milan where he spent four days.
