Romano Prodi (Italian: [roˈmaːno ˈprɔːdi] ; born 9 August 1939) is an Italian politician who served as President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004 and twice as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1996 to 1998, and again from 2006 to 2008. Prodi is considered the founder of the Italian centre-left and one of the most prominent figures of the Second Republic. He is often nicknamed Il Professore ("The Professor") because of his academic reputation.
A former professor of economics and international advisor to Goldman Sachs, Prodi ran as lead candidate of The Olive Tree coalition, winning the 1996 election and serving as prime minister until losing a vote of confidence 1998. He was subsequently appointed President of the European Commission in 1999, serving until 2004. Following the victory of his new coalition, The Union, over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi, at the 2006 election, Prodi became prime minister a second time. On 24 January 2008, he lost a vote of confidence in the Senate and consequently tendered his resignation as prime minister to President Giorgio Napolitano; he continued in office for almost four months for routine business until early elections were held and a new government was formed. Prodi was the first left-leaning candidate to finish first in an Italian general election since 1921.
In 2007, Prodi became the founding president of the Democratic Party. In 2008, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon selected Prodi as president of the African Union–United Nations peacekeeping panel. Since 2021, he is serving as the United Nations Special Envoy for the Sahel.
Prodi was born in Scandiano, near Reggio Emilia, in 1939; he is the eighth of nine children. His father, Mario Prodi, was an engineer who grew up in a peasant family, and his mother, Enrichetta, was an elementary school teacher. Most of the brothers are, or have been, university professors, among them Giovanni Prodi (professor of mathematical analysis), Vittorio Prodi (professor of physics and member of the European Parliament), Paolo Prodi (professor of modern history), Franco Prodi (professor of atmospheric physics), and Giorgio Prodi (professor of general pathology).
In 1969, Prodi married Flavia Franzoni, at that time a student, who later became an economist and university professor. The couple was married by Camillo Ruini, now a well-known cardinal. They have two sons, Giorgio and Antonio. His wife, Flavia, died on 13 June 2023 at the age of 76.
After completing his secondary education at the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto in Reggio Emilia, Prodi graduated in law at Milan's Università Cattolica in 1961 with a thesis on the role of protectionism in the development of Italian industry. He then carried out postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics.
Prodi has received almost 20 honorary degrees from institutions in Italy, and from the rest of Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.
Ministry of Industry and Aldo Moro's kidnapping
On 25 November 1978, Prodi was appointed Minister of Industry, Commerce, and Crafts in the government of the Christian Democracy leader Giulio Andreotti. Even if he was a party member, Prodi was widely considered a technical minister. As minister, he promoted a law, known as Prodi law, which aimed a regulating of the extraordinary state administration procedure for the rescue of large enterprises in crisis.
On 2 April 1978, Prodi and other teachers at the University of Bologna passed on a tip-off that revealed the whereabouts of the safe house where the kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former prime minister, was being held captive by the Red Brigades. Prodi stated that he had been given this tip-off by the founders of Christian Democracy, contacted from beyond the grave via a séance and a Ouija board. Whilst during this supposed séance Prodi thought Gradoli referred to a town on the outskirts of Rome, it probably referred to the Roman address of a Red Brigades safe house, located at no. 96, Via Gradoli.
The information was trusted, and a police group made an armed blitz in the town of Gradoli, 80 km from Rome, on the following day, 6 April, although Moro was not found. The supernatural element was generally not overlooked during the investigations. For example, the Italian government had engaged a diviner, hoping that he would find Moro's location. The police made another fruitless blitz in Viterbo after an abbess declared that, during a vision, she had seen him there.
Prodi spoke to the Italian Parliament's commission about the case in 1981. In the notes of the Italian Parliament commission on terrorism, the séance is described as a fake, used to hide the true source of the information. In 1997, Andreotti declared that the information came from the Bologna section of Autonomia Operaia, a far-left organization with some ties with the Red Brigades, and that Francesco Cossiga also knew the true source. Judge Ferdinando Imposimato considered Andreotti's theory as possible but accused him of having kept information that could have been valuable in a trial about Moro's murder. Moro's widow later declared that she had repeatedly informed the police that a Via Gradoli existed in Rome, but the investigators did not consider it; some replied to her that the street did not appear in Rome's maps. This is confirmed by other Moro relatives but strongly denied by Cossiga, who served as Interior Minister during Moro's kidnapping.
In the 1990s, the séance matter was reopened by the Italian Parliament's commission on terrorism. While Prodi (then Prime Minister) declared that he had no time for an interview, both Mario Baldassarri (senator and vice-minister in two Silvio Berlusconi cabinets) and Alberto Clò (Minister of Industry in Lamberto Dini's cabinet and owner of the house where the séance was performed) responded to the call; they confirmed the circumstances of the séance, and that Gradoli had appeared in several sessions, even if the participants had changed. Later, other Italian members of the European Commission alleged that Prodi had invented this story to conceal the real source of the tip-off, which they believed to have originated somewhere among the far-left Italian political groups.
This issue came back again in 2005, when Prodi was accused of being "a KGB man" by Mario Scaramella. The allegations were rejected by Prodi. Former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Alexander Litvinenko also said that FSB deputy chief Anatoly Trofimov "did not exactly say that Prodi was a KGB agent, because the KGB avoids using that word." The same accusation was raised in 2002 by the Mitrokhin Commission, which was closed in 2006 with a majority and a minority report, without reaching shared conclusions, and without any concrete evidence given to support the original allegations of KGB ties to Italian politicians contained in the Mitrokhin Archive. Led by the centre-right coalition majority, it was criticized as politically motivated, as it was focused mainly on allegations against opposition figures. 2006 saw the publication of telephone interceptions between the chairman of the Mitrokhin Commission, Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, and Scaramella. In the wiretaps, Guzzanti made it clear that the true intent of the Mitrokhin Commission was to support the hypothesis that Prodi would have been an agent financed or in any case manipulated by Moscow and the KGB. According to the opposition, which submitted its own minority report, this hypothesis was false, and the purpose of the commission was therefore to discredit him. In the wiretaps, Scaramella had the task of collecting testimonies from some ex-agents of the Soviet secret service refugees in Europe to support these accusations; he was later charged for calumny.
In November 2006, the new Italian Parliament with a centre-left coalition majority instituted a commission to investigate the Mitrokhin Commission for allegations that it was manipulated for political purposes. In a December 2006 interview given to the television program La storia siamo noi, colonel ex-KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky, whom Scaramella claimed as his source, confirmed the accusations made against Scaramella regarding the production of false material relating to Prodi and other Italian politicians, and underlined their lack of reliability. Despite this, those claims were further repeated by the UK Independence Party's Gerard Batten, the member of the European Parliament for London who stated that he was informed of this by Litvinenko, who was his constituent and former FSB operative. The 16 February 2018 indictment of Paul Manafort unsealed on 23 February, as part of the Mueller special counsel investigation, alleges that foreign politicians hypothesized to be Prodi and Alfred Gusenbauer took payments exceeding $2 million from Manafort to promote the case of his client, Viktor Yanukovich; both denied this and said their work was focused to get closer European Union–Ukraine relations.