It was April 2013 when Giorgio Napolitano, at the age of 87, was forced to return to the Chamber of Deputies, a room he did not expect to set foot in again after the end of his seven-year term as President of the Republic. Italian politicians, who had just emerged from a tumultuous election, had failed in one of their most important tasks, the secular conclave that has been held every seven years since 1948 to elect the president of the Republic.
Napolitano, octogenarian and with decades of service to his country behind him, returned to the palace of Montecitorio with emotion, but he was not for organs. In his speech he booed the politicians for a lack of responsibility that in his opinion had condemned Italy to sterility. And then he swore in his second term, being the first president of the Italian Republic to repeat the position and then becoming the longest-serving monarch in the history of republican Italy.
King Giorgio, or Lord George, as they called him, was a symbol of resistance, the first communist leader who was authorized to travel to the United States and, above all, the guardian of the Italian labyrinth during the hard years of the economic crisis and the fall of Berlusconism. He died yesterday at the age of 98.
It had been a few years since the lifetime senator, due to his advanced age, had health problems and acknowledged that he felt fragile. In 2018, he underwent heart surgery in an operation that left him with sequelae. In May, he underwent surgery on his abdomen. When he resigned, in 2015, after an unprecedented two-year encore, Napolitano explained that he had verified the limitations imposed by age on the exercise of institutional duties.
Born on June 29, 1925 in Naples, he never had any other vocation other than politics. He followed the path marked by his father, Giovanni Napolitano, a prestigious Neapolitan lawyer with cultural concerns and studied Law. But he did not hesitate to found an anti-fascist cell with other young people opposed to Mussolini who ended up taking actions of resistance against the Nazis in Campania. In 1945, after the war, he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which he would end up being one of the most prominent leaders of the apertura wing of the most important communist formation outside the Soviet Union.
The first elections in which he participated were the second since the proclamation of the Republic, those of 1953, which registered an important advance of the left of the PCI and the PSI. He grew comfortable with international travel and traveled to the US in 1978, where he lectured at Harvard. He dealt with foreign policy and economic policy.
Between the sixties and seventies he stood next to Giorgio Amendola, the representative of the soul of the party most inclined to a rapprochement with European social democracy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall he remained active, despite the dissolution of the PCI, and in 1992 he became president of the Chamber of Deputies. He was a member of the European Parliament and Minister of the Interior under Romano Prodi as a reward for having contributed to the formation of Olivera.
His most important responsibility came in 2006, when he was promoted to Head of State. Although he did not get a comfortable majority, he soon proved that he had been a good choice for his temperament after navigating the various crises he had to face, from the fall of the Prodi government in 2008 to Berlusconi’s in 2011, in the midst of the European financial turmoil, with the successive ascension of the technocrat Mario Monti. To prevent Italy from bleeding to death in a political battle, he agreed to become the first president in the history of the Italian Republic to serve a second seven-year term. His successor, Sergio Mattarella, has followed the same path. The Constitution did not prevent it, but until then it had been considered that a seven-year term was enough to leave a mark on the country’s democracy.
Not that Napolitano wanted it – he was then almost 88 years old and very much looking forward to retirement – ??but he understood the surrender of the Italian political parties, who went to the Quirinal to beg him to do this last service to the country. Even Italian bishops understood the impasse in which Rome was sunk and pressed for acceptance. It was a time when Italy was blocked by the lack of agreements after the elections of February 2013 and the international image of the country was in doubt. He resigned two years later. With his death, Italy loses one of the last great political minds of recent times.
