Silvia Costa (politician)

Silvia Costa (2014)

Silvia Costa (born June 12, 1949 in Florence ) is an Italian journalist and politician . As a member of the Partito Democratico , she was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 .

Life and politics

Costa studied philology in Rome. She then worked as a journalist for the public broadcaster RAI . Costa began her political engagement with the women's organization Democrazia Cristiana (DC). From 1976 to 1985 she was a member of the Rome City Council. From 1978 to 1985 she was editor of the Christian Democratic party newspaper Il Popolo . In the parliamentary elections in 1983 she was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for the first time , to which she belonged for three legislative terms until 1994. From 1987 to 1993 she was a member of the parliamentary committee for the supervision of public broadcasting, from 1992 to 1993 secretary of the education committee. In the Ciampi cabinet , she was State Secretary in the Ministry of Science from 1993–94 . In 1993/94 she participated in the transformation of the disintegrating DC into the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI).

From 1995 to 2005 Costa was a member of the Consiglio nazionale dell'economia e del lavoro (CNEL), and from 1995 to 2002 she was president of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma . During the center-left governments from 1997 to 2000, she chaired the Committee on Equal Opportunities between Men and Women at the Prime Minister's Office . After the merger of the PPI with several smaller Christian Democratic and social liberal parties to form Democrazia è Libertà - La Margherita in 2002, Costa was a member of the national board of this party. After the victory of the center-left alliance L'Unione in the regional elections in Lazio in 2005, she acted as an alderman for education under the regional president Piero Marrazzo until 2009.

Play media file

Costa talks about European human rights policy (video in Italian, 3:26 minutes)

The Margherita party merged in 2007 with the social democratic Democratici di Sinistra to form the Partito Democratico (PD), of which Costa has been a member since then. In the 2009 European elections , Costa was elected to the European Parliament. There she joined the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Social Democrats (S&D), became deputy chair of the delegation for relations with Iraq and a member of the committees on culture and education, as well as women's rights and gender equality . After her re-election in 2014 , she was Chair of the Committee on Culture and Education (until January 2017, then a simple member of the committee) and a delegate for the Parliamentary Stabilization and Association Committee EU-Albania. In 2019 she left the European Parliament.

Web links

• Official website of Silvia Costa
• Entry on Silvia Costa in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs