Sergio Mattarella

Sergio Mattarella (born 23 July 1941) is an Italian politician, jurist, academic, and lawyer who has been President of Italy since 2015.

He is the longest-serving president in the history of the Italian Republic.

Since Giorgio Napolitano's death in 2023, Mattarella has been the only living Italian president.

Mattarella was born in Palermo on 23 July 1941 into a prominent Sicilian family.

His father Bernardo Mattarella was an anti-fascist who, alongside Alcide De Gasperi and other Catholic politicians, founded Christian Democracy (DC), which dominated the Italian political scene for almost fifty years, with Bernardo serving as a minister several times.

Bernardo Mattarella has also been accused of being associated with the Sicilian Mafia; however, accusations were always rejected in court.

His mother Maria Buccellato came from an upper-middle-class family of Trapani.

During his youth, Mattarella moved to Rome due to his father's commitments to politics.

In Rome, he became a member of Azione Cattolica (AC), a large Catholic lay association, of which he became the regional chairman for Lazio from 1961 to 1964.

After attending Istituto San Leone Magno, a classical lyceum (liceo classico) in Rome, he studied law at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he joined the Italian Catholic Federation of University Students (FUCI).

In 1964, Mattarella graduated with merit with the thesis The Function of Political Direction.

In 1966, Mattarella married Marisa Chiazzese, daughter of Lauro Chiazzese, former rector of the University of Palermo, with whom he had three children: Laura, Francesco, and Bernardo.

In 1967, he became a lawyer in Palermo, becoming particularly involved in administrative law.

A Catholic leftist politician, Mattarella was a leading member of the Christian Democracy party from the early 1980s until its dissolution.

On 6 January 1980, his older brother Piersanti Mattarella, who was also a DC politician and president of Sicily since 1978, was killed by the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo.

This event deeply changed Mattarella's life, and he left his academic career to enter politics.

One of the first important positions that Mattarella held was the head of the board of arbitrators of the DC, quickly reconstituted at the end of 1981 following the Propaganda Due scandal and the establishment of the related parliamentary commission of inquiry, chaired by Tina Anselmi.

The internal body of the party had been charged with identifying the militants registered in the Masonic lodge of Licio Gelli to expel or suspend them, having violated the statute of the party that prohibited registration to Masonic lodges.

In 1982, Cosa Nostra killed the PCI regional secretary Pio La Torre and the prefect of Palermo Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa.

These tragic events shook the credibility of the regional political system dominated by DC.

In the following year, Mattarella was entrusted by Ciriaco De Mita, the DC secretary, to "clean up" the Sicilian branch of the party from Mafia control, at a time when mafia made men like Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino were powerful political figures in the region.

After a few years, Mattarella started teaching parliamentary procedure at the University of Palermo, where he remained until 1983.

His academic activity and publications during this period mainly concerned constitutional law topics, the intervention of Sicilian government in economy, bicameralism, legislative procedure, expropriation allowance, evolution of the Sicilian regional administration, and controls on local authorities.

Mattarella's parliamentary career began in 1983, when he was elected member of the Chamber of Deputies with nearly 120,000 votes in the constituency of Palermo.

As a deputy, Mattarella joined the left-leaning faction of the DC known as morotei.

The faction, close to Aldo Moro, supported an agreement with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) led by Enrico Berlinguer, the so-called Historic Compromise; his brother Piersanti Mattarella also supported it.

In 1985, he helped the young lawyer Leoluca Orlando, who had worked alongside his brother Piersanti during his governorship of Sicily, to become the new mayor of Palermo; the two men set out to break the Mafia's hold on the island, transferring budget authority from the corrupt regional government back to the cities and passing a law enforcing the same building standards used in the rest of Italy, thereby making the Mafia's building schemes illegal.

He served as Minister for Parliamentary Relations from 1987 to 1989, and Minister of Education from 1989 to 1990.

In 1987, Mattarella was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies with more than 143,000 votes, remaining close to the left-leaning faction of the party as well as to its secretary De Mita.

On 29 July 1987, Mattarella was appointed Italian Minister for Parliamentary Relations in the government led by the DC prime minister Giovanni Goria.

The government lasted until April 1988, when De Mita was sworn in as new prime minister; however, Mattarella was confirmed as minister.

In 1994, Mattarella was among the founders of the Italian People's Party (PPI), serving as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy from 1998 to 1999, and Minister of Defence from 1999 to 2001.

He joined The Daisy in 2002 and was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (PD) in 2007, leaving it when he retired from politics in 2008.

He also served as a judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy from 2011 to 2015.

On 31 January 2015, Mattarella was elected to the presidency on the fourth ballot, supported by the centre-left coalition majority led by the PD and centrist parties.

Despite having initially ruled out a second term, he was re-elected on 29 January 2022, becoming the second Italian president to be re-elected, the first being Napolitano.

As of 2024, five prime ministers have served under his presidency, among them Matteo Renzi, then the PD's leader and main sponsor of his presidential candidacy, Paolo Gentiloni, a leading member of the PD who succeeded Renzi after his resignation in 2016, Giuseppe Conte, at that time an independent politician who governed both with right-wing and left-wing coalitions in two consecutive cabinets, Mario Draghi, a banker and former president of the European Central Bank, who was appointed by Mattarella to lead a national unity government following Conte's resignation, and Giorgia Meloni, Italy's first ever female prime minister and leader of the right-wing coalition which won the general election in September 2022.

During his long-time tenure, Italy faced the aftermath of the Great Recession, as well as the severe European migrant crisis, which deeply marked Italian political, economic and social life, bringing to the rise of populist parties.

Like his predecessor Napolitano, Mattarella has been accused of wielding the largely ceremonial role of head of state in an executive manner; his successful opposition to the appointment of Paolo Savona as Minister of Economy and Finance led to a constitutional crisis and threats of impeachment, and he has twice intervened in government formations by appointing his own candidates for prime minister (Gentiloni in 2016 and Draghi in 2021) in lieu of calling new elections.

Moreover, in 2020, Italy became one of the countries worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, being the first country in the Western world to implement a national lockdown to stop the spread of the disease.