Romano Prodi
Romano Prodi was prime minister of Italy twice, from 1996 to 1998 and from 2006 to 2008, the Bologna economics professor who beat Silvio Berlusconi in both elections and lost his majority in both parliaments. In between he was president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, the years of the euro's notes and coins and the enlargement to ten new members. His first government did what nobody thought Italy could and qualified for the euro in 1998 by a tax for Europe and a deficit cut from seven per cent to below three, and fell within months when Rifondazione Comunista withdrew. He was born in Scandiano in 1939, the eighth of nine children of an engineer, studied at the Catholic University of Milan and the London School of Economics, taught industrial economics at Bologna, and was chairman of IRI, the state holding company that owned a fifth of Italian industry, from 1982 to 1989 and again in 1993, when he began selling it. The Olive Tree coalition he built in 1995, of the former Communists and the former Christian Democrats of the left, was the first centre-left to win an Italian election, in April 1996, and its government's whole purpose was the single currency. The Treasury minister Ciampi and Prodi cut the deficit by a fifth of GDP in two years, the tax for Europe was partly refunded, and Italy was in the first wave. Bertinotti's Rifondazione brought him down in October 1998 over the budget by one vote. The Commission was given him by the leaders as a safe pair of hands after Santer's fell to fraud, and his five years launched the euro in twelve countries on 1 January 2002, admitted the eight central European states with Malta and Cyprus on 1 May 2004, and were faulted for the Stability Pact he called stupid and for his own remoteness in Brussels. He came home in 2004 to unite the centre-left as the Union and beat Berlusconi in April 2006 by twenty-five thousand votes, and the second government, with nine parties and a senate majority of two, lasted twenty months and fell in January 2008 when the justice minister's party walked out. Berlusconi won again. He was the UN's envoy for the Sahel, ran for president of the republic in 2013 and was betrayed by a hundred and one of his own party's electors, and has been the elder of the centre-left since, from Bologna.
- Lived: 1939 CE – ?
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: prime minister, economist, politician
