Giorgio Napolitano
Giorgio Napolitano was the first communist to be head of the Italian state, and he used the office to remove an elected prime minister and install an economist. He joined the party during the war and spent forty years in it as the leader of its reformist wing, the faction that argued for social democracy, accepted the Atlantic alliance and was distrusted by the rest of the party for both. He was the first Italian communist granted a visa to the United States. After the party dissolved itself he was interior minister, then a member of the European Parliament, and in 2006 he was elected president at eighty - a biography that would have been unthinkable in the office thirty years earlier. The presidency became something else in November 2011. Italian borrowing costs went past the level at which the debt could not be refinanced, the government of the day had no majority for the measures its partners demanded, and Napolitano appointed an economist he had made a senator for life days beforehand to form a cabinet of technicians, having made clear to the sitting prime minister that his support was gone. It was constitutional and it was decisive; it was also the removal of a government by a head of state under foreign financial pressure, and the argument about whether a democracy can do that and remain one has not settled since. In April 2013 the electoral college failed six times to elect anyone at all, the parties came to him, and he agreed to a second term at eighty-seven - the first re-election in the history of the office and one he had said repeatedly he did not want. He took it on the condition, stated in a furious address to a parliament that applauded standing up, that they reform the institutions they had just proved incapable of operating. They did not, and he resigned in January 2015 having given them twenty-one months.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
