Arturo Parisi

Arturo Parisi

Arturo Mario Luigi Parisi (born September 13, 1940 in San Mango Piemonte , Salerno province ) is an Italian politician of the Partito Democratico (PD). From May 2006 to May 2008 he served in the second Prodi cabinet as Italian Defense Minister .

Political and academic career

Arturo Parisi grew up in Sassari ( Sardinia ), where the family had moved because his father was employed as the inspector of the State Forestry Agency. Shortly after the end of World War II , his father died of the effects of injuries sustained while on duty. In 1955 Parisi moved back to his home region of Campania , where he completed the last three years of his humanistic high school education at the Neapolitan Scuola Militare Nunziatella . From 1958 to 1968 he completed his law degree at the University of Sassari , a. a. with the law professor and later President Francesco Cossiga . In addition, from 1963 to 1968 he was involved in leading positions in Catholic Action on a national level and was thus under the formative influence of its then chairman Vittorio Bachelet . He was elected to the board of the International Union of Catholic Youth.

After starting his academic career as a research assistant for statistics, he left the University of Sassari in 1968 and initially taught canon law and church history in Parma and Florence . From 1971 he worked at the University of Bologna , where he qualified as a full professor for political sociology in the 1980s . From the end of the 1980s he headed the social science Istituto Cattaneo and the magazine Il Mulino published by it for more than ten years . At the same time, he was President of the Italian Society for Election Research (Società italiana degli Studi elettorali) and participated from 1987 to 1988 in the commission of experts to draw up the government program and in the parliamentary committee of inquiry into terrorism in Italy (Commissione Stragi) .

Together with Mario Segni , he was one of the initiators of a movement for institutional reforms in the early 1990s. As a political advisor and friend of Romano Prodi , he played a key role in the formation of the L'Ulivo electoral alliance in 1995 and became State Secretary to the Prime Minister in the Prodi cabinet . In February 1999 he founded Prodi I Democratici , a forerunner party to what would later become Democrazia è Libertà - La Margherita , and took over its chairmanship a few months later. After Prodi's move to the office of EU Commission President , he won his constituency in Bologna in a by-election in November 1999 and became a member of the Chamber of Deputies . In the La Margherita party, which was formed in 2001 , he took over the chairmanship of the unification congress and was one of the most famous initiators of the primaries ( primarie ) for the nomination of the prime minister within the center-left alliance. The organizational provisions for such primaries, which have also been held since then to fill other important party offices, are largely due to Arturo Parisi.

After the center-left won the election, Parisi was appointed Minister of Defense on May 17, 2006. In this function he was mainly responsible for the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq in December 2006 . As part of the process of merging several governing parties to form the Partito Democratico , he supported Rosy Bindi's candidacy for party chairmanship in 2007 .

Web links

• Personal website (Italian)