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. At the time the longest-serving president in Italian history, and the first to achieve re-election, he played a dominant role in Italian politics for almost a decade, leading some critics to refer to him as Re Giorgio ("King Giorgio").
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, which was inspired by the values of democratic socialism, looked favourably to social democracy, and was interested in revisionist Marxism. 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. A close friend of Henry Kissinger, he was also the first high-ranking leader of a communist party to visit the United States, which he did in 1978.
In 2005, Napolitano was appointed a senator for life in Italy by then president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In the May 2006 Italian presidential election, he was elected by the Italian Parliament as president of Italy. A pro-Europeanist, Napolitano was the first former Communist to hold said office. During his first term in office, he oversaw governments both of the centre-left coalition, such as the second Prodi government, and the centre-right coalition, such as the fourth Berlusconi government. In November 2011, Silvio Berlusconi resigned as prime minister of Italy amid financial and economic problems. In keeping with his constitutional role, Napolitano then asked former European commissioner Mario Monti to form a cabinet, which critics referred to as a "government of the president".
Napolitano intended to retire from politics after his seven-year presidential term expired, but reluctantly agreed to run again in the 2013 presidential election to safeguard the continuity of the country's institutions during the parliamentary deadlock that followed the February 2013 Italian general election. He was the first sitting president to run for a second term. On being re-elected as president with broad cross-party support in Parliament, he overcame the impasse by inviting Enrico Letta to propose a grand coalition government. When Letta handed in his resignation in February 2014, Napolitano mandated Matteo Renzi (Letta's factional challenger) to form a new government. After a record eight and a half years as president, citing age factors, the 89-year-old Napolitano resigned in January 2015. He had already stated that he did not intend to serve out a full second term. He then resumed his Italian Senate seat, which he held until his death in 2023.
Napolitano was often accused by his critics of having transformed a largely ceremonial role into a political and executive one, acting as kingmaker during his political tenure. Supporters instead credited him with saving Italy from the brink of default during the European debt crisis and subsequent political stalemates, which helped to stabilize the country. At the time of his death in 2023, he was the longest-serving Italian President as well as the longest-lived Italian President on record. He was also the oldest head of state in Europe and the third oldest in the world, behind the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. A state funeral in secular form was held for Napolitano on 22 September 2023. In office for 8 years and 244 days, he was the longest-serving president until the record was surpassed by Sergio Mattarella in 2023. 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; he is considered one of the symbols of the Second Italian Republic, which came about after the Tangentopoli scandal of the 1990s.
Napolitano was born in Naples, Campania, on 29 June 1925. His father, Giovanni, was a liberal lawyer and poet. His mother, Carolina (Bobbio), descended from a noble Piedmontese family. Napolitano studied at the Classical Lyceum Umberto I, graduating in 1941. That year, his family moved to Padua, and he graduated from the lyceum Titus Livius. In 1942, he matriculated at the University of Naples Federico II, studying law. During this period, Napolitano adhered to the local Fascist University Groups (Gruppi Universitari Fascisti), where he met his core group of friends, who shared his opposition to Italian fascism. As he would later state, the group "was in fact a true breeding ground of anti-fascist intellectual energies, disguised and to a certain extent tolerated".
An enthusiast of the theatre since secondary school, during his university years, he contributed a theatrical review to the IX Maggio weekly magazine and had small parts in plays organized by the Gioventù Universitaria Fascista itself. He played in a comedy by Salvatore Di Giacomo at Teatro Mercadante in Naples. Napolitano dreamt of being an actor and spent his early years performing in several productions at the Teatro Mercadante. He also loved reading the poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, and Salvatore Quasimodo.
Napolitano has often been cited as the author of a collection of sonnets in Neapolitan dialect published under a pseudonym, Tommaso Pignatelli, and entitled Pe cupià 'o chiarfo ("To Mimic the Downpour"). He denied this in 1997 and on the occasion of his presidential election, when his staff described the attribution of authorship to Napolitano as a "journalistic myth". He published his first acknowledged book, entitled Movimento Operaio e Industria di Stato ("Workers' Movement and State Industry"), in 1962.
World War II and anti-fascist resistance
During the existence of the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945), a puppet state of Nazi Germany in the final period of World War II, Napolitano and his circle of friends took part in several actions of the Italian resistance movement against German and Italian fascist forces. In 1944, along with the group of Neapolitan communists, such as Mario Palermo and Maurizio Valenzi, Napolitano prepared the arrival in Naples of Palmiro Togliatti, the long-time leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) who was in exile since 1926 when the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) was banned by the Fascist regime in Italy; Togliatti was one of few leaders not to be arrested, as he was attending a meeting of the Comintern in Moscow. In 1945, Napolitano joined the PCI.
From post-war years to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
Following the end of the war in 1945, Napolitano became the PCI's federal secretary for Naples and Caserta. In 1947, he graduated in jurisprudence with a final dissertation on political economy, entitled Il mancato sviluppo industriale del Mezzogiorno dopo l'unità e la legge speciale per Napoli del 1904 ("The Lack of Industrial Development in the Mezzogiorno following the Unification of Italy and the Special Law of 1904 for Naples"). He became a member of the Secretariat of the Italian Economic Centre for Southern Italy in 1946, which was represented by Giuseppe Paratore, where he remained for two years. Napolitano played a major role in the Movement for the Rebirth of Southern Italy for over ten years.
On 11 June 1946, nine days after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum in which Italy became a republic, Napolitano was at the headquarters of the Communist federation in via Medina when they were besieged for many hours by a crowd of royalist demonstrators who were enraged by the display of the party's red flag and the tricolour without the Savoy coat of arms. Many of them were empoverished people who, in the words of Napolitano years later, were "immersed in the context of a real social disintegration". They were animated by feelings of loyalty to the Savoy monarchy and by the ancient feeling of Southern Italy separatism, which had reawakened against Northern Italy, which had first wanted fascism and had imposed it on the South, and now wanted to impose the republic. About this event, which became known as the via Medina massacre, he later ruled out that it was only "the work of provocateurs, troublemakers, professional agitators, and criminals".