Biography

Giorgio Napolitano (Italian: [ˈdʒordʒo napoliˈtaːno]; 29 June 1925 – 22 September 2023) was an Italian politician who served as the president of Italy from 2006 to 2015, the first to be re-elected to the office.[1][2] In office for 8 years and 244 days, he was the longest-serving president, until the record was surpassed by Sergio Mattarella in 2023. He also was the longest-lived president in the history of the Italian Republic,[3] which has been in existence since 1946. Although he was a prominent figure of the First Italian Republic, he did not take part in the Constituent Assembly of Italy that drafted the Italian constitution;[3] he is considered one of the symbols of the Second Italian Republic, which came about after the Tangentopoli scandal of the 1990s.[3] Due to his dominant position in Italian politics, some critics have sometimes referred to him as Re Giorgio ("King Giorgio").[4] Napolitano was a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party, which he joined in 1945 after taking part in the Italian resistance movement, and of its post-Communist democratic socialist and social democratic successors, from the Democratic Party of the Left to the Democrats of the Left. He was a leading member of migliorismo, a reformist, moderate, and modernizing faction on the right-wing of the PCI,[5][6][7] which was inspired by the values of democratic socialism,[8] looked favourably to social democracy, and was interested in revisionist Marxism.[9] First elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1953, he took an assiduous interest in parliamentary life and was president of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994. He was Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998 during the first Prodi government.[10] A close friend of Henry Kissinger,[11] he was also the first high-ranking leader of a communist party to visit the United States, which he did in 1978.[10]