Giorgio Napolitano, sworn into office on Monday as Italy’s 11th president, is a former communist who, at the age of 80, is one of the country’s most-experienced politicians.
The life senator and former speaker of the lower house Chamber of Deputies moves into the presidential Quirinale Palace for a seven-year term, succeeding Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, only marginally older at 85.
Born in Naples on June 29 1925, Napolitano has worked closely in the past with incoming prime minister Romano Prodi, having served as interior minister in the latter’s first government in 1996.
He will need to use all his considerable experience to pour oil on Italy’s troubled political waters after Prodi’s razor-thin April 9-10 general election victory, which outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi initially refused to accept.
For a start, he will have to reassure Berlusconi’s centre-right alliance of impartiality after Prodi failed to win cross-party consensus for Napolitano.
Berlusconi’s House of Freedoms coalition refused to endorse his candidacy, seeing him as too left-wing, campaigning instead for a centrist candidate with more cross-party appeal.
In the end, Napolitano was elected by lawmakers on the third day of voting, and only with the support of Prodi’s centre-left.
As president, Napolitano will have the power to call new elections in case of a government crisis and to promulgate new laws, which he can also send back to Parliament for revision.
The Presidency is seen as a guarantee of national unity and guardian of the Constitution.
Napolitano forged his political career during World War II when he took part in the resistance against Nazi and fascist troops, founding a communist group in 1942.
At the end of the war in 1945, he became an official member of the Italian Communist Party, entered politics and was elected to Parliament for the first time in 1953.
He quickly became a key party organiser as a member of the party’s national committee and was one of the most-influential leaders of its reformist wing.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Napolitano joined the current Democrats of the Left, like many other communists.
He was speaker of the lower house from 1992 to 1994, later becoming Interior Minister in Prodi’s first centre-left government between 1996 and 1998.
In October last year, he was named a lifetime senator by Ciampi.
He has been married for nearly 50 years, and is father of two children and twice a grandfather. — AFP
