Achille Occhetto

Achille Occhetto

Achille Occhetto (born March 3, 1936 in Turin ) is an Italian politician . Sporadically he was nicknamed "Akel". He was elected general secretary of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in 1988, which was renamed Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS) in 1991 . Occhetto remained at the head of the newly formed party until 1994.

Political career

Early party career

As the son of a middle-class family from Turin, Occhetto was National Secretary of the communist youth organization FGCI from 1962 to 1966 . In the same year he was elected to the PCI Central Committee for the first time . He acted as head of the agitation and propaganda department . From 1969 to 1977 he initially worked as secretary of the provincial leadership of the PCI in Palermo , later as regional secretary in Sicily . a. engaged in the fight against the mafia . From 1976 he represented the constituency of Palermo in the Italian Chamber of Deputies . After his return to the Roman party headquarters, he first took over the management of the schools and universities department, then the department for southern Italian affairs. In 1983 he was elected to the party secretariat during Enrico Berlinguer's tenure as general secretary.

General Secretary of the PCI and turn of Bolognina

After his appointment as national coordinator of the PCI in 1986, when Alessandro Natta resigned prematurely as Secretary General, he was his predestined successor, especially since he had also been the only Deputy Secretary General up to that point. At a meeting of the Central Committee and the Control Commission of the PCI on July 21, 1988, Occhetto was elected head of his party in an open vote for the first time with three votes against and five abstentions. He also won a seat in the European Parliament in 1989 .

During his tenure as General Secretary, the PCI had to deal with the decline of the communist system of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall . Occhetto therefore declared the communist experiment over and dissolved the PCI in order to found a new left party, the PDS. This was accompanied by a change from the European United Left to the socialist faction in the European Parliament. This political change (known as Bolognina in Italy ) was not accepted by an estimated one third of PCI members who did not join the PDS and instead founded the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC).

After the time as Secretary General

In the parliamentary elections in 1994 Occhetto stood as a candidate against Silvio Berlusconi ( Forza Italia ) and, as a result of his electoral defeat, gave up the office of General Secretary to Massimo D'Alema . In 2001 he left the Chamber of Deputies after 25 years and seven legislative terms. Instead, Occhetto was elected to represent the Calabria region in the Italian Senate , where he belonged to the "mixed group" of non-attached senators until 2006.

For the 2004 European elections , Occhetto did not stand for his own party (which had since been renamed Democratici di Sinistra , DS, i.e. left-wing democrats), but founded a list with the former anti-corruption prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro and his party Italia dei Valori . After differences of opinion with Di Pietro, however, immediately after the election, he left his mandate to Giulietto Chiesa , a former communist journalist. In November 2004, together with Chiesa, Elio Veltri , Paolo Sylos Labini , Antonello Falomi and Diego Novelli, he founded the association Il Cantiere per il bene comune (“The construction site for the common good”) and was appointed its national coordinator. When Antonio Di Pietro was appointed Minister of Infrastructure in May 2006, Occhetto succeeded him in the European Parliament. Unlike Di Pietro, who had belonged to the liberal ALDE group , Occhetto rejoined the social democratic group. After a few months, however, he again gave up his seat and was replaced by Beniamino Donnici (a former member of the neo-fascist MSI ).

Occhetto did not want to participate in the 2007 merger of the Democratici di Sinistra with other center-left parties to form the Partito Democratico . On December 14, 2007 he joined the Sinistra Democratica founded by left deviants of the DS . This was incorporated into the Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL) in 2009 . In this, however, Occhetto no longer had a leading position. On the occasion of the 2018 parliamentary elections , he called for support for the pro-European List + Europe of the top candidate Emma Bonino .

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1. ↑ Playing Mussi annuncia l'ingresso di Occhetto in Sinistra Democratica
2. ^ Appello di Occhetto: "Firmare per lista Bonino" ADN Kronos, December 29, 2017.

Web links

• Entry on Achille Occhetto in the European Parliament 's database of deputies