Rome – Giorgio Napolitano again made history on April 20 when he became the first Italian president to be re-elected.
It is a second big first for the 87-year-old, who also became the first former Communist to fill the country’s highest institutional post when he was sworn in as head of state seven years ago.
At the time, the former interior minister and House speaker was already the second-oldest president to take office after Sandro Pertini, who was 82 when he was elected in 1978.
A pragmatic moderate, he was a champion of the left party’s transformation into a social democratic party, the Democratic Party of the Left (subsequently the Democratic Left) after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In his long political career he took an increasingly pro-US and pro-European line.
Napolitano after his speech to Senate
Napolitano after his speech to Senate
Napolitano was born in Naples on June 29, 1925, the son of a high-profile city lawyer. A theatre and cinema enthusiast, Napolitano’s initial bid to study literature at Naples University was thwarted by his father, who instead forced his son into taking law.
During the Second World War, Napolitano suspended his studies, joining an anti-Fascist underground organization in 1942. A year later, his excellent English allowed him to act as an interpreter when Allied forces entered Naples.
Before his re-election, Napolitano had repeatedly ruled out serving a second term. “I am convinced that the founding fathers conceived the role of President of the Republic as measured in seven year terms. There are age factors and its limitations to consider,” Napolitano said in March.
But then he had yielded to the appeals out of a sense of responsibility toward the nation.
His election received a standing ovation from MPs and plaudits from abroad. President Obama was one of the first to congratulate with Italian President.
The octogenarian president said he would stay in office as long as he was able at his swearing-in as president for the second time on Monday. The 87-year-old president said he would carry out his seven-year mandate according to the stipulations of the law and “as long as my strength allows me”.
His first inauguration speech in front of the Parliament was one of the most moving and firm that has been pronounced by an Italian president.
Napolitano addressed without any doubt all the main issues that have brought Italy to a difficult political and economical situation, praising (or forcing) the Parliament to find a way to work together.
He called on Italy to meet its obligations on debt and finances, while working to “advance the united Europe…to re-launch the dynamism and the spirit of solidarity”.
“Napolitano’s words were the most exemplary and extraordinary that I have ever heard in 20 years,” right wing leader Silvio Berlusconi said. On the same line was the troubled center-left Democratic Party’s leader Pier Luigi Bersani, “Napolitano said what he had to say with exceptional efficacy”.
Entering his second term, the president is once again faced with a list of problems he expected to pass on to a successor.
At the top is a near three-way tie after elections in late February that produced no clear winner and a hung parliament, now in its ninth week without a government.
Second on Napolitano’s list of daunting challenges is the Italian economy, which after more than a year of tough austerity measures has now to avoid a recession.
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