The former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was admitted to intensive care at a hospital in Milan on Wednesday and is expected to remain for a few days, hospital officials said.
The hospital, San Raffaele, declined to give further details about Mr. Berlusconi’s health, but the Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told reporters in Brussels that Mr. Berlusconi, 86, had been admitted because a “problem related to a previous infection had not been resolved.” Mr. Tajani added that Mr. Berlusconi “was talking.”
Last week, Mr. Berlusconi spent a few days in San Raffaele, where his personal physician, Alberto Zangrillo, is head of anesthesia and intensive care. Italian news outlets reported that he had been admitted for routine medical checks.
After he was discharged, Mr. Berlusconi posted on Facebook to thank “all those who thought of me with closeness and affection during these days.” He added that he was back at work “ready and determined to commit myself, as I always have, to the country I love.” Mr. Berlusconi was elected to the Italian Senate in national elections in September.
Mr. Berlusconi has battled a series of health problems in recent years, including a case of Covid in September 2020, which he described as an “infernal disease” and “very ugly.” At the time, he said doctors had told him that, out of the thousands of tests conducted at San Raffaele, he had “come out in the top five in terms of the strength of the virus.”
Ten months later, he spent 24 days at the hospital because of long-term effects from the coronavirus, according to Italian news reports.
Mr. Berlusconi also has had a pacemaker since 2006, has survived prostate cancer, and in 2016, had an operation to replace a faulty heart valve. He also suffered a fractured nose when an attacker struck him with a statuette of the Milan cathedral at a rally in that city in 2009.
Mr. Berlusconi’s political career stalled in 2013, when he was stripped of his Senate seat after being convicted of tax fraud the year before. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but that was reduced to 10 months of community service, which he performed in a home for older adults near Milan. He was also banned from holding public office for six years, but he campaigned for his party, Forza Italia, in 2018, portraying himself as the nation’s reassuring grandfather figure.
Forza Italia became the major force in Italy’s center-right coalition after Mr. Berlusconi ran for Parliament in 1994, and he served as prime minister for seven months, starting in 1994, then again from 2001 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2011, when Italy was swept up in the European debt crisis.
But Mr. Berlusconi and Forza Italia became increasingly overshadowed by other parties on the right, including by the anti-immigrant League, under Matteo Salvini, and more recently, by the post-Fascist Brothers of Italy. In the elections last year, Brothers of Italy took first place, and its leader, Georgia Meloni, became the country’s first female prime minister.
Mr. Salvini, now the transport and infrastructure minister, was among Mr. Berlusconi’s well-wishers on Wednesday.
“Forza Silvio, Italy is waiting for you,” Mr. Salvini wrote on Facebook.
Mr. Berlusconi was accompanied by his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, a lawmaker for Forza Italia, when he was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday, and the Italian news media reported that several members of Mr. Berlusconi’s family had also visited him, including his five children, who declined to speak to the many reporters who had converged on the hospital.
Mr. Berlusconi’s brother, Paolo Berlusconi, who left the hospital on Wednesday evening after visiting, did give an update. “He’s a rock, he’ll make it this time, too,” Paolo Berlusconi said.
