An Italian president doesn’t have the direct, government powers of a US or French head of state. Typically the function is dismissed as largely ceremonial. Giorgio Napolitano, who served as president from 2006 to 2015, confirmed simply how flawed that description is.
In late 2011, because it turned clear that the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was unable to deal with the disaster then ravaging the eurozone, Napolitano artfully lined up a successor by giving the previous EU commissioner Mario Monti a seat in parliament as a life senator.
After the 2013 normal election, with the legislature deadlocked and unable to agree on his successor as president, Napolitano, then aged 87, reluctantly agreed to remain on. As soon as reinstalled, he swiftly discovered a means out of the deadlock within the type of Enrico Letta, a chief minister acceptable to proper and left alike. Then, when Letta’s authorities stalled in early 2014, Napolitano gave his blessing to a cold putsch by Letta’s celebration chief, Matteo Renzi.
In little greater than two years, Napolitano, who has died aged 98, had achieved the exceptional feat of steering into authorities three successive prime ministers, none of whom had led their celebration to victory in a normal election.
“King George”, the New York Occasions known as him, and in its Italianised kind, Re Giorgio, the nickname caught on immediately amongst his compatriots. It encapsulated too his noble, nearly regal, bearing, his command of English (most of his contemporaries had realized French), and his resemblance to Italy’s final king, Umberto II.
Napolitano was, briefly, concerning the final man in Italy you’d suspect of being a communist. But, till the day in 1991 that it was wound up, he had been a member of the PCI, the Italian Communist celebration.
Born in Naples, the son of Carolina (nee Bobbio) and Giovanni Napolitano, he emerged from that comparatively slender layer of Italian society, the southern upper-middle class. His father was a lawyer and poet. The younger Giorgio entered Federico II College in Naples in 1942 as a legislation scholar and there met his future spouse, Clio Bittoni.
His first expertise of politics got here on the different finish of the ideological spectrum, as a member of the Gruppo Universitario Fascista. Napolitano wrote concerning the theatre for the GUF’s weekly paper and had ambitions as an actor. However regardless of its title, the group was a breeding floor for younger opponents of Mussolini’s regime.
Napolitano moved swiftly leftwards and in 1945 joined the PCI. Whereas nonetheless a scholar – graduating two years later – he turned the celebration’s federal secretary in Naples. By 1953, he was a member of the legislature. In 1956, he was taken on to the central committee of the PCI.
It was the 12 months of the Hungarian rebellion and Napolitano, to his subsequent profound embarrassment, voiced approval for its suppression by Soviet tanks. As variations over the response to the rebellion and different points opened increasingly more cracks within the obvious monolithic construction of the PCI, Napolitano emerged as a average – the chief of a faction its critics dubbed the migliorista or “improver” tendency, as a result of it was seen as striving to enhance the residing circumstances of the proletariat reasonably than to undermine and overthrow capitalism.
Enrico Berlinguer, who took over the management of the PCI in 1972, emerged as essentially the most average of the so-called eurocommunists who argued for a particular, non-Soviet model of Marxism extra suited to western European circumstances. However Napolitano was extra average nonetheless and have become certainly one of Berlinguer’s principal inside critics. Henry Kissinger as soon as known as the tall southerner “my favorite communist”.
Napolitano was the primary chief of the PCI to be granted a visa to go to the US, in 1978. He additionally turned the primary former communist to be elected speaker of the chamber of deputies (in 1992), the primary ex-communist to be entrusted with the delicate job of inside minister (1996-98), and, in 2006, the primary ex-communist president.
His huge problem got here after Berlusconi returned as prime minister in 2008, after Romano Prodi misplaced a vote of confidence. As a former Marxist, Napolitano was susceptible to claims that if he criticised or obstructed the media tycoon it was for causes of ideological distinction. Greater than as soon as, he appeared like going too far to allay any such suspicion.
He signed into legislation a invoice that gave the prime minister immunity – a legislation that his critics argued was unconstitutional, and which the constitutional court docket certainly threw out in 2009. And he later endorsed an equally controversial invoice permitting the prime minister to delay court docket proceedings in opposition to him.
However the concept Napolitano was comfortable on Berlusconi turned more and more tough to maintain because the repercussions of the euro disaster unfold to Italy in 2011. What precisely occurred between Napolitano, the European Central Financial institution president Mario Draghi and the German chancellor Angela Merkel will solely be recognized when the historical past books are written. However the best way through which Monti was supplied with the wherewithal to take over the federal government speaks of a level of co-ordination that Berlusconi and his supporters have since depicted as complete. That model, nonetheless, ignores the truth that Berlusconi’s celebration was crumbling and that he finally resigned to keep away from the humiliation of defeat in parliament.
Napolitano’s second time period as president, which ended with his resignation in January 2015, was not fairly as controversial. However he turned embroiled nonetheless in an investigation by Sicilian magistrates into negotiations between the authorities and the mafia within the early Nineties.
A letter from his authorized adviser implied that Napolitano, who on the time was speaker of the decrease home, had recognized about them. He defused the affair by agreeing to reply questions at a particular listening to within the presidential palace. It was the primary time that an incumbent Italian head of state was questioned in a mafia trial: the final of his many firsts, and maybe the one he can be happiest for future historians to disregard.
He’s survived by Clio, whom he married in 1959, and by their two sons, Giulio and Giovanni.
