Carlo Azeglio Ciampi
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi got Italy into the euro as a minister and then spent seven years as president trying to give it back a patriotism that was not nationalism. He was a central banker by career, governor of the Bank of Italy for fourteen years, and in 1993 he became the first prime minister of the republic who had never sat in parliament - appointed to hold the country together in the middle of the corruption collapse, and the man under whom the electoral law was rewritten. As treasury minister from 1996 he ran the operation that qualified Italy for monetary union against most expectations, including a one-off tax levied explicitly to meet the deficit criterion and repaid afterwards, which the public accepted because he asked for it plainly. Elected president in 1999 on the first ballot, he took up a project that sounds trivial and was not. The symbols of the Italian state - the flag, the anthem, the anniversary of the republic, the memory of the Risorgimento - had been left to the political right by a left that associated them with fascism, and to nobody by a public that associated them with the state's incompetence. Ciampi spent his term reclaiming them. He restored the military parade on the republic's anniversary and opened the grounds of the presidential palace to the public. He travelled continuously to provincial commemorations that no head of state had attended in decades, most of them for the partisans and the deportees. In speech after speech he argued that a constitutional patriotism was the precondition of a functioning democracy and the exact opposite of an ethnic one. He also used the presidency's few hard powers against the majority of the day. He returned a broadcasting bill to parliament in 2003 on the ground that it did not secure pluralism, an unmistakable act given that the prime minister owned most of the country's private television, and he publicly defended the courts and the constitution during a period of sustained attack on both. He declined to stand for a second term in 2006, at eighty-five, saying the office needed someone with a full seven years in him.
- Lived: 1920 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
