Giorgio Napolitano

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".