Giorgio Napolitano was the only re-elected President in the history of the Italian Republic, sworn in a second time on 22nd April, 2013 (the first had been in 2006). After five rounds of voting, the Parliament had still not mustered a consensus on a candidate. Napolitano agreed to stand as a compromise, feeling a duty to his nation, he said.
Italy had been paralysed politically, by the euro zone debt crisis. The president, during his two mandates safeguarding the continuity of the country’s institutions, oversaw a lot of such inertia, while both the centre-left and centre-right were in power.
With a degree in legal theory, a member of the Italian Communist Party since the end of WWII, as a moderate, he was first elected to the national parliament in 1953, representing his home city of Naples almost uninterrupted until 1996, when Romano Prodi named him Interior Minister.
A strong supporter of European integration, from 1989 to 1992 he was a Member of the European Parliament as wel
Comments