Silvio Berlusconi’s health is slowly but progressively improving, doctors said Friday, more than two weeks after the 86-year-old former Italian prime minister and media mogul was hospitalised in Milan.
Berlusconi was admitted to the intensive care unit at the San Raffaele on April 5, with what doctors later said was leukaemia and a lung infection.
He was moved to a normal hospital ward on Sunday.
“The clinical picture of… Silvio Berlusconi appears to be slowly but progressively improving,” doctors Alberto Zangrillo and Fabio Ciceri said in an update issued Friday.
Berlusconi, who was prime minister three times between 1994 and 2011, has been in and out of hospital for several years, notably after contracting coronavirus in 2020.
He is currently a senator and president of his right-wing Forza Italia party, a junior partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, although he rarely appears in public.
On Wednesday, he was well enough to talk to some of his allies on the telephone.
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, from Forza Italia, tweeted that he had received a phone call, adding: “We await the return of our leader. Go Silvio!”
Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, another member of Meloni’s coalition, revealed that he too had received a call from Berlusconi.
The two men chatted for a “few minutes”, ending with some jokes about the progress of Berlusconi’s old football club, AC Milan, the League said.
