Giorgio Napolitano

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Giorgio Napolitano (2006)
Signature of Giorgio Napolitano

Giorgio Napolitano ( listen ? / I ; born June 29, 1925 in Naples ) is an Italian politician ( PCI , (P) DS ) and senator for life . He was a high-ranking functionary of the Italian Communist Party , a member of the Chamber of Deputies for decades , and its president from 1992 to 1994. From 1996 to 1998 he was the Italian Minister of the Interior . Audio file / audio sample

From May 2006 to January 2015 he was the eleventh President of Italy . For the first time in the history of the Italian Republic, Napolitano was a former communist who held the office of head of state. He was also the first Italian president to be elected for a second term, but resigned before it expired due to his old age.

Life

Napolitano completed a law degree at the University of Naples Federico II in the 1940s , which he successfully completed in 1947. At the same time, he was active from 1942 onwards for the fascist student organization GUF, especially their theater group, and wrote cinema and theater reviews for their weekly newspaper IX Maggio . He later claimed that within the GUF in Naples there was a “real foster home for anti-fascist intellectual energies”, “masked and even tolerated to a certain extent”. After Mussolini was deposed and Italy changed sides in World War II (1943), Napolitano came into contact with communist groups in 1944.

Career in the Communist Party

Napolitano as a young MP (1953)

In 1945 Napolitano joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and in 1953 became a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies . Like many other communists in the 1950s, political opponents accused him of playing down the crimes of Stalinism .

Napolitano and Enrico Berlinguer

Napolitano rose to the Eighth Party Congress (1956) on the Central Committee of his party and became one of the most influential personalities of the PCI. At the X. Party Congress (1962) he was elected to the governing body (direzione) of the party. Party Congress (1966) in the Politburo and in the Secretariat, the closest leadership circle. He was always considered one of the leading representatives of the moderate reformist wing of the party. According to this, better living conditions for the workers and social justice should be achieved primarily through reforms (hence the name Miglioristi ) and a revolutionary overthrow of the system should be avoided. He clearly distanced himself from Soviet communism - for example, he criticized the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan , advocated cooperation with PSI and the integration of his country into the European Union and NATO . His greatest adversary was Enrico Berlinguer , who processed some of his ideas in the concept of Eurocommunism , but did not go far enough from Napolitano's point of view.

After the PCI had largely "social democratized" in the course of the 1980s, Napolitano was the first leading member in February 1989 to speak out in favor of renaming the Communist Party, proposing Partito del Lavoro ("Party of Labor"). After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, General Secretary Achille Occhetto and a majority of party delegates also joined the idea, although the name Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS, "Democratic Left Party") was chosen. Napolitano also remained active in leading political positions in the PDS.

In his capacity as foreign policy spokesman for his party, he often clashed with his own functionaries, as he advocated close ties between his country and the USA : "We must resist the temptation to make America the nightmare of the left once again," he said in 1991 at a party congress. When he justified the international US-dominated coalition and its military intervention in the Iraq-Kuwait war , he also received boos.

Parliamentary seats and interior ministers of Italy

Portrait of Napolitan as President of the Chamber of Deputies

Napolitano was from 1953 to 1963 and from 1968 to 1996 - a total of ten legislative periods - member of the Italian House of Representatives ( Camera dei deputati ), where he always represented the constituency of Naples. From 1989 to 1992 he also had a seat in the European Parliament , where he belonged to the group of the European United Left . In the years following the transformation of the Italian Communist Party into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), Napolitano held the office of President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994.

After the first election victory of the center-left alliance L'Ulivo, which was largely supported by the PDS , Napolitano was interior minister in the Prodi I cabinet from 1996 to 1998 . The Italian daily La Repubblica later described him as "the best interior minister of the last 30 years."

A second term as a member of the European Parliament followed from 1999 to 2004, this time as a member of the social democratic group . Due to his services to the Italian Republic, he was appointed Senator for life by then President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in October 2005 at the same time as Sergio Pininfarina .

Term of office as President

Giorgio Napolitano and US President Barack Obama in Rome in 2009
Napolitano speaks in 2014 before the European Parliament, next to him Martin Schulz

On May 7, 2006 Napolitano was proposed by then Prime Minister Romano Prodi as a compromise candidate for the office of Italian President. On May 10, 2006, he was elected President in the fourth ballot. Napolitano is considered the grand master of Italian politics, as modest and moderate. In November 2011, his work in connection with the resignation of long-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi received worldwide attention. On November 13, 2011, Napolitano commissioned the independent Mario Monti to form a new government.

In December 2012 - Monti had previously announced his withdrawal and Berlusconi had announced a comeback attempt in the parliamentary elections in Italy 2013 - Napolitano read “thoroughly the riot act” in a speech to politicians of the Italian political class (FAZ). He dissolved parliament on December 22, 2012. The President can only dissolve Parliament in the last six months of his term of office if the parliamentary term normally ended up to six months before or after the term of office of the President. This would have been the case in May 2013, which is why Napolitano was allowed to dissolve the company three months earlier. Due to the seven-year term of office of the Italian President, which ended on May 15, 2013, a new election was necessary in April amid a government crisis due to the parliamentary elections.

On April 18, 2013, Franco Marini ran for office in two rounds; in both he did not achieve the required two-thirds majority . Romano Prodi ran in the third and fourth ballots; he decided against another ballot. For the fifth ballot, 266 of the total of 1,007 members of the electoral assembly did not even appear, the majority of the others cast blank ballot papers. In this situation, the 87-year-old Napolitano ran in the sixth ballot on April 20 at the request of prominent politicians from various political camps, contrary to his previous intention, and was re-elected with 738 votes. On April 22nd, he was sworn in for his second term after he had resigned for formal reasons, as his first term of office would normally not have ended until May 15.

Napolitano holds the longest term of office of an Italian president with 3,166 days. On December 31, 2014, in his New Year's address to the Italian people, he announced that due to his old age (89 at the time) he was aiming to retire soon. On January 14, 2015, he finally signed his resignation letter and left office. After his resignation, Senate President Pietro Grasso took over the duties of head of state on a temporary basis. Sergio Mattarella was elected Napolitano's successor on January 31, 2015 and sworn in on February 3.

Witness in anti-mafia trials

In October 2014, Napolitano became the first incumbent head of state in Italy to testify in a mafia trial that allegedly took place in the early 1990s between high-ranking representatives of the state and representatives of organized crime. Napolitano's testimony was a bit explosive because in 2013 he obtained legal action to delete tape recordings that documented a conversation between him and former Interior Minister Nicola Mancino , who was accused of working with the Mafia . Napolitano was never accused of any wrongdoing; however, the deletion of the tape conversation corroborated the suspicion among observers that the Italian state could not contain the murders of the Mafia in those years (see Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino ) by virtue of its authority, but only through negotiations with the criminals.

Others

In his youth, Napolitano worked as an actor , among other things . He is married to Clio Maria Bittoni, with whom he has two sons.

In 1997 Giorgio Napolitano was honored with the Leibniz-Ring-Hannover .

Giorgio Napolitano, as President of the Republic, carried out the following official trips abroad:

Works in German translation

See also

Web links

Commons : Giorgio Napolitano  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Giorgio Napolitano: Dal Pci al socialismo europeo. Un'autobiografia politica. Laterza, Rome / Bari 2008. Original quote: “Era in effetti un vero e proprio vivaio di energy intellettuali antifasciste, mascherato e fino a un certo punto tollerato.”
  2. ↑ 'Cambiare nome? Non e proibito '. In: La Repubblica , February 14, 1989.
  3. ↑ From Communist to President , in: www.orf.at (14.09.2006)
  4. ↑ stern.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.stern.de  
  5. ^ Napolitano and Monti (FAZ December 19, 2012)
  6. ↑ A compromise that divides. In: Süddeutsche.de . April 18, 2013, accessed April 20, 2013 .
  7. ↑ Presidential election in Italy: Prodi withdraws his candidacy. In: Spiegel Online . April 19, 2013, accessed April 20, 2013 .
  8. ↑ Quirinale: a quinta votazione 210 schede a Rodota ', 20 per Napolitano. (No longer available online.) Agenzia stampa quotidiana nazionale - asca, April 20, 2013, archived from the original on March 24, 2014 ; Retrieved April 23, 2013 (Italian). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.asca.it
  9. ↑ Quirinale: Napolitano eletto con 738 voti. Adnkronos / Ign, April 20, 2013, accessed April 23, 2013 (Italian).
  10. ^ President Napolitano re-elected. ( Memento from April 29, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  11. ↑ Quirinale, Napolitano si è dimesso.
  12. ↑ Soon resignation of the Italian President: Napolitano says Arrivederci. In: Spiegel.de . December 31, 2014, accessed January 4, 2015 .
  13. ↑ Unclear succession: Italy's President Napolitano resigns. In: Spiegel.de . January 14, 2015, accessed January 14, 2015 .
  14. ^ Italy's new president Mattarella: A clean man from Sicily. In: Spiegel Online. January 31, 2015, accessed February 1, 2015 .
  15. ↑ Sergio Mattarella sworn in: Italy has a new president. In: n24.de. February 3, 2015, accessed February 3, 2015 .
  16. ^ President of Italy Questioned in Mafia Case , New York Times, October 28, 2014
  17. ↑ "We know where you live!" How dangerous is it to write a Mafia novel? An encounter with the author Petra Reski in Palermo , Ijoma Mangold , DIE ZEIT, November 12, 2014
  18. ↑ Brief descriptions of the trips on quirinale.it
personal data
SURNAME Napolitano, Giorgio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian politician, MEP and President
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples