Luigi Di Maio

Luigi Di Maio (born 6 July 1986) is an Italian politician who has been serving as EU Special Representative for the Gulf region since 1 June 2023.

Luigi Di Maio was born in Avellino, in 1986; he was the eldest of three brothers.

His father Antonio was a small real estate entrepreneur and local councilor for the Italian Social Movement (MSI), while his mother was a teacher of Italian and Latin.

Di Maio attended the Liceo classico and then he enrolled at the University of Naples Federico II to study engineering, but after failing, subsequently changing to law.

Di Maio is a dropout and never graduated from university.

In 2007, he was registered as an apprentice journalist, later attempting to work as a webmaster.

He would then become a concessions vendor selling water at the Stadio San Paolo in Naples.

In 2007, Di Maio was among the founders of the political group "Friends of Beppe Grillo", the predecessors of the Five Star Movement (M5S), founded by the popular comedian in October 2009.

In 2010, he ran in the Council elections of Pomigliano, in which the Five Star Movement obtained 548 votes and Di Maio 59, ranking first among the candidates of his party, but not enough to be elected.

In the 2013 election, he was nominated as candidate for the M5S with 189 online votes and elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament at 26 years old.

On 21 March 2013, he became the youngest Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies.

From September 2017 to January 2020, Di Maio was the leader of the Five Star Movement, an anti-establishment party founded by Beppe Grillo.

He resigned from this position to quell discontent and stem the flow of party desertions and expulsions after he led the party into coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party.

In June 2022, Di Maio left the M5S due to tensions with Giuseppe Conte over providing support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, founding his own political group, Together for the Future (IpF).

IpF had a brief life, being disbanded following a poor performance in the 2022 Italian general election (in which it ran within the Civic Commitment electoral list alongside Democratic Centre).

On 12 July 2017, Di Maio was formally investigated for defamation following a complaint filed by Marika Cassimatis, former M5S mayoral candidate in Genoa, while, on 28 July 2017, the journalist Elena Polidori filed a complaint against him also for defamation.

Di Maio invoked his parliamentary immunity; he had previously criticized that privilege and pledged never to avail himself of it.

In 2017, Beppe Grillo announced that he would campaign in the 2018 election, but he would not be the candidate for the position of Prime Minister.

Di Maio was considered as the front runner and the most likely candidate for the premiership of Italy.

Di Maio had been often labeled as the most pragmatic and "institutional", but also the least populist Five Star politician; he is considered the leader of the moderate and "governmental" faction of the movement.

No other leading members of the M5S, such as Alessandro Di Battista, a politician and personal friend of Di Maio, or Roberto Fico, leader of the M5S left-wing faction and rival of Di Maio and Di Battista, would run for the office.

Di Maio's opponents were the Senator Elena Fattori (Vice President of the 9th Permanent Senate Committee) and six other city councilors.

Many of them were almost unknown and this led to a lot of criticism from the Democratic Party, Lega Nord and Forza Italia, which considered this ballot a false primary election, with the only aim of appointing Di Maio as M5S candidate without any real challenger.

In September 2017 Di Maio was elected Prime Ministerial candidate and Political Head of the M5S, with more than 82% of the vote.

Before the 2018 general election, Di Maio announced a referendum to quit the Euro and stated his position to leave.

He proposed to dismantle the NATO alliance and criticised the United States commitment against Russia.

In the 2018 general election, the M5S became the party with the largest number of votes and of parliamentary seats, while the centre-right alliance, in which Matteo Salvini's League emerged as the main political force, won a plurality of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate and the centre-left coalition, led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, came third.

However, no political group or party won an outright majority, resulting in a hung parliament.

On 7 April, Di Maio made an appeal to the PD to "bury the hatchet" and consider a governing coalition with his party.

On 7 May, President Mattarella held a third round of government formation talks, after which he formally confirmed the lack of any possible majority (M5S rejecting an alliance with the whole centre-right coalition, PD rejecting an alliance with both M5S and the centre-right coalition, and the League's Matteo Salvini refusing to start a government with M5S but without Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, whose presence in the government was explicitly vetoed by M5S's leader Luigi Di Maio); on the same circumstance, he announced his intention to soon appoint a "neutral government" (irrespective of M5S and League's refusal to support such an option) to take over from the Gentiloni Cabinet which was considered unable to lead Italy into a second consecutive election as it was representing a majority from a past legislature, and offering an early election in July (on what it would be the very first time for a summer general election in Italy) as a realistic option to take into consideration due to the deadlock situation.

The Lega and M5S agreed to hold new elections on 8 July, an option that was however rejected by all other parties.

On 9 May, after a day of rumours surfaced, both Di Maio and Salvini officially requested President Mattarella to give them 24 more hours to strike a government agreement between the two parties.

Later the same day, in the evening, Silvio Berlusconi publicly announced Forza Italia would not support a M5S-League government on a vote of confidence, but he would still maintain the centre-right alliance nonetheless, thus opening the doors to a possible majority government between the two parties.

On 13 May, 5 Star Movement and League reached an agreement in principle on a government program, likely clearing the way for the formation of a governing coalition between the two parties, but could not find an agreement regarding the members of a government cabinet, most importantly the prime minister.

M5S and League leaders met with Italian President Sergio Mattarella on 14 May to guide the formation of a new government.

On their meeting with President Mattarella, both parties asked for an additional week of negotiations to agree on a detailed government program and a prime minister to lead the joint government.

Both M5S and the League announced their intention to ask their respective members to vote on the government agreement by the weekend.

On 21 May 2018, Di Maio and Salvini proposed the private law professor Giuseppe Conte for the role of Prime Minister in the 2018 Italian government, despite reports in the Italian press suggesting that President Mattarella still had significant reservations about the direction of the new government.

On 23 May 2018, Conte was invited to the Quirinal Palace to receive the presidential mandate to form a new cabinet.

Di Maio also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2019 to 2022, as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of Economic Development, Labour and Social Policies from 2018 to 2019, and as Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies in the 17th Italian legislature.