The former president of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, died this Friday in Rome at the age of 98. For some time now he had serious health problems related to his advanced age. President of the republic for two consecutive terms (2006-2015), he finally died this Friday at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, where he was admitted several days ago for various health complications.
Napolitano (Naples, 1925) was also president of the Chamber of Deputies, Minister of the Interior, European parliamentarian and senator.
Giorgio Napolitano has been for many years a reference of pragmatism in Italian politics for his common sense and institutional sense. A respected figure because he was always lucid and very well informed.
He was a cold-blooded politician, almost Anglo-Saxon in a hot-blooded country. Sometimes to the detriment of popular consensus, he always put his intelligence at the service of an Italian national political project; although that project, with the passage of history, has changed several times before his eyes, evolving from Marxist socialism to liberal constitutionalism, until identifying European unification as the new sun of the future.
During the First Republic and as a communist leader, he was very active in the attempt to disassociate the PCI from the Russian revolutionary myth and bring it into the mainstream of European social democracy. For this he risked the leadership of the party, thus becoming for decades the recognized leader of the right-wing minority of the PC.
The end of Italian communism, buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, opened a second political life for him. It was in these turbulent years when Napolitano most directly influenced national political life and often determined its evolution, with an interventionism that his adversaries often reproached him with resentment, but that undoubtedly helped the republic to emerge from moments of serious and dangerous stagnation.
