Former head of state Giorgio Napolitano, who was twice president of Italy, died in Rome on Friday. He underwent surgery on his abdomen last year and had been in poor health for some time. Napolitano, born in Naples, was 98 years old.
After decades in Italian politics, there are few positions, barring the premiership, that he has not held. Napolitano became a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1945 and entered the Italian House of Representatives in 1953. He served in the Italian and European parliaments and was appointed senator for life. He served as Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi from 1996 to 1998.
He became president in 2006. In Italy, the head of state is not directly elected by the people, but by parliament. At the end of his seven-year term, in 2013, Italian parliamentarians could not agree on a replacement, although Napolitano had made it crystal clear in advance that he was not even considering a new term: “I can’t remain president far beyond my ninetieth, can I? ” He was already 87 years old at the time. He was re-elected, unwillingly.
Napolitano, who served as head of state with five Italian prime ministers, quit two years into his new term of office. In 2015, he passed the baton to Sergio Mattarella, also a doyen of Italian politics. Mattarella is still president, because history repeated itself last year: then the Italian parliamentarians also failed to agree on his succession.
Crucial political moments
In Italy, the president mainly holds a ceremonial position, but still plays an important role at crucial political moments. The head of state appoints the prime minister and can dissolve parliament (or not at all), thus determining whether and when elections will be held. That also gives the president somewhat of a political guiding function.
In 2011, for example, Italy was under relentless pressure from international financial markets. But then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was mainly concerned with the scandals surrounding his own person, and forced by circumstances he eventually resigned. There were no new elections, because President Napolitano appointed former European Commissioner Mario Monti at the head of a technocratic transitional government, which was supposed to bring Italy to calmer economic waters.
Giorgio Napolitano was a leading member of the Italian communist party PCI, “but he belonged to the more moderate wing,” recalls political scientist Franco Pavoncello, university rector in Rome, who describes Napolitano as “a man who sought dialogue at home and abroad.” .
Outside Italy, it was mainly about America. In 1978, Napolitano became the first communist Italian politician to receive a travel visa for the US. In Italy itself, Napolitano contributed to the historic rapprochement between the communists, to which he himself belonged, and the Christian Democratic power party Democrazia Cristiana (DC). “He sought dialogue at a very difficult moment,” Pavoncello notes. After all, the Soviet Union and the Italian Communist Party still existed at that time.
That this dialogue, in addition to being difficult, was also life-threatening became apparent when Aldo Moro, the equally moderate party leader of the DC, was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978. That far-left terrorist group wanted to punish Moro for the historic rapprochement between Christian Democrats and communists that moderate politicians like him and Giorgio Napolitano had sought.
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