President Sergio Mattarella
Sergio Mattarella OMRI OMCA (born 23 July 1941) is an Italian politician, statesman, jurist, academic, and lawyer who is currently serving as the 12th 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.
A Catholic leftist politician, Mattarella was a leading member of the Christian Democracy party from the early 1980s until its dissolution. He served as Minister for Parliamentary Relations from 1987 to 1989, and Minister of Education from 1989 to 1990. 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. 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. 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.
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 1967, he became a lawyer in Palermo, becoming particularly involved in administrative law. 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.
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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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 March 1989, a maxi-competition for professorships was held for the secondary school. Mattarella reorganized also the teaching programs of two-year high schools, completing the first steps of the so-called "Brocca project", the educational system's revision program, undertaken under his predecessor Giovanni Galloni in 1988. Mattarella also oversaw the overall reform of the elementary school, which made the three teachers' module on two classes universal on 23 May 1990, leading to the overcoming of the traditional single teacher.
On 23 July 1989, Mattarella became Italian Minister of Education in the sixth cabinet of Giulio Andreotti. In January 1990, Mattarella led the first National School Conference, which discussed the renewal of the educational system and addressed the issue of school autonomy. At the end of June 1990, the so-called "anti-drug law" was approved, which mandated health education to schools; the combination of the education system and preventive measures, not only in health matters, was part of the programmatic lines that the minister had drawn. On 27 July 1990, Mattarella resigned from his position, together with other ministers, upon the Italian Parliament's passing in 1990 of the Mammì Act, liberalising the media in Italy, which they saw as a favour to the media magnate Berlusconi.
In 1990, Mattarella was elected deputy secretary of the DC. He left the post two years later to become director of Il Popolo, the official newspaper of the party. Following the 1993 Italian referendum, he drafted the new electoral law nicknamed Mattarellum. The electoral law consisted in a parallel voting system, which act as a mixed system, with 75% of seats allocated using a first-past-the-post electoral system and 25% using proportional representation, with one round of voting.
During those years in the early 1990s, the whole Italian political system was shocked by the Tangentopoli corruption scandal; Mattarella was not directly involved in the scandal. In August 1993, he was among the recipients of an investigation's notification that followed the statements of a Sicilian real estate entrepreneur, who accused him. Mattarella resigned from all his posts and was thanked by Mino Martinazzoli, the then DC leader, who expressed his support to him. Martinazzoli's statement was publicly criticized by Francesco Cossiga because it was in contrast with what was done for other politicians involved in the scandal. Mattarella was later acquitted of the charge.
Mattarella was one of the protagonists of the renewal of the DC after Tangentopoli that would lead in January 1994 to the foundation of the Italian People's Party (PPI). In the ensuing 1994 Italian general election, in which the newly founded PPI fared poorly, Mattarella was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He soon found himself engaged in an internal dispute after the election of new party leader Rocco Buttiglione, who wished to steer the PPI towards an electoral alliance with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI). Following Buttiglione's appointment, Mattarella resigned as director of Il Popolo in opposition to this policy. In a 20 July 1994 interview with l'Unità, Mattarella considered the new political proposal that was taking shape for a new centre-left coalition interesting, "especially for those who are very nostalgic for Aldo Moro's political strategy." In 1995, at the height of the internal conflict within the PPI, he addressed Buttiglione, who was stubbornly seeking an alliance with the political right, as "el general coup leader Roquito Butillone" and defined "an irrational nightmare" the hypothesis that Berlusconi's FI could be accepted into the European People's Party.
Mattarella was one of the first supporters of the economist Romano Prodi at the head of the centre-left coalition known as The Olive Tree in the 1996 Italian general election. After the electoral victory of the centre-left, Mattarella served as leader of the PPI's parliamentary group. Two years later, when the Prodi I Cabinet fell, Mattarella was appointed by Massimo D'Alema as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy with responsibility for the secret services, which he tried to reform. The reform of the secret services proposed by Mattarella collected the indications provided by the Jucci Commission, which had worked extensively on the subject, and aimed at strengthening the political control of the services by the prime minister of Italy, in coordination with the Digis (Government Department of Security Information), by removing power from the Interior Ministry and Defense. It was the basis for the 2007 reform of the secret services.
In December 1999, Mattarella was appointed Italian Minister of Defence in the D'Alema II Cabinet. As Minister of Defence, he supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia against the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević; he also approved a reform of the Italian Armed Forces which abolished conscription. After the resignation of D'Alema in 2000, Mattarella kept his position as Minister of Defence in the Amato II Cabinet.
In October 2000, the PPI joined with other centrist parties to form an alliance called The Daisy (DL), later to merge into a single party in March 2002. Mattarella was re-elected to the Italian Parliament in the 2001 and 2006 general elections, standing as a candidate for The Daisy in two successive centre-left coalitions: The Olive Tree and The Union (L'Unione). In 2007, Mattarella was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (PD), a big tent centre-left party formed from a merger of left-wing and centrist parties which had been part of The Olive Tree, including The Daisy and the Democrats of the Left (heirs of the PCI).
On 5 October 2011, Mattarella was elected by the Italian Parliament with 572 votes to be a judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy. He was sworn in on 11 October 2011 and served until he was sworn in as President of the Italian Republic in January 2015.
On 31 January 2015, Mattarella was elected the president of Italy at the fourth ballot with 665 votes out of 1,009, with support from the Democratic Party (PD), New Centre-Right, Civic Choice, Union of the Centre, and Left Ecology Freedom. Mattarella was officially endorsed by the PD after his name was put forward by Matteo Renzi, the prime minister of Italy at the time. He replaced Giorgio Napolitano, who had served for 8 years and 244 days, the longest presidency in the history of the Italian Republic; since Napolitano had resigned on 14 January, Senate president Pietro Grasso was the Acting President at the time of Mattarella's inauguration on 3 February. Mattarella's first statement as new president was thusly: "My thoughts go first and especially to the difficulties and hopes of our fellow citizens."
Mattarella's first presidential visit was on the day of his election, when he visited the Fosse Ardeatine, where during World War II in 1944 the German Nazi occupation troops killed 335 people as a reprisal for an Italian resistance movement attack. Mattarella stated that "Europe and the world must be united to defeat whoever wants to drag us into a new age of terror".
On 16 February 2015, Mattarella appointed Ugo Zampetti as Secretary-General to the Presidency of the Republic, the head of the presidential secretariat. While three days before, on 13 February, the President appointed Giovanni Grasso as his special counselor for press and communication. As of 2023, Zampetti, a civil servant with a long-time experience within Italian politics, and Grasso, a journalist and writer, are still holding their posts.
On 6 May, he signed the new Italian electoral law, known as Italicum, which provides for a two-round system based on party-list proportional representation, corrected by a majority bonus and a 3% election threshold. Candidates run for election in 100 multi-member constituencies with open lists, except for a single candidate chosen by each party who is the first to be elected.
On 4 December 2016, a constitutional referendum was held in Italy. Voters were asked whether they approve a constitutional law that amends the Constitution of Italy to reform the composition and powers of the Parliament of Italy, as well as the division of powers between the state, the regions, and administrative entities. The bill, put forward by then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and his centre-left Democratic Party, was first introduced by the government in the Senate on 8 April 2014. After several amendments were made to the proposed law by both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, the bill received its first approval on 13 October 2015 (Senate) and 11 January 2016 (Chamber of Deputies), and its second and final approval on 20 January (Senate) and 12 April (Chamber of Deputies).
In accordance with Article 138 of the Constitution of Italy, a referendum was called after the formal request of more than one-fifth of the members of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, since the constitutional law had not been approved by a qualified majority of two-thirds in each house of parliament in the second vote. 59.11% of voters voted against the constitutional reform, meaning it did not come into effect. This was the third constitutional referendum in the history of the Italian Republic; the other two were in 2001, in which the amending law was approved, and in 2006, in which it was rejected.
Following the defeat, Prime Minister Renzi resigned. On 11 December, Mattarella appointed the incumbent Minister of Foreign Affairs Paolo Gentiloni as new head of the government. Gentiloni led a government composed by PD, NCD, and other minor centrist parties, the same majority of Renzi's. According to many political analysts and commentators, the appointment of Gentiloni caused tensions between Mattarella and Renzi, who asked the president to dissolve the parliament and call for a snap election in 2017. This version was later confirmed by Renzi during a press conference following the 2018 general election, in which he stated it was an error not to vote in 2017.
The March 2018 election resulted in a hung parliament, with no coalitions able to form a majority of seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The election was seen as a backlash against the Establishment with the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League becoming the two largest parties in the Parliament.
After the election's results were known, Luigi Di Maio, leader of the M5S, and Matteo Salvini, secretary of the League, each urged that Mattarella should give him the task of forming a new cabinet because he led the largest party or coalition, respectively. On 5 March, Matteo Renzi declared the PD to be in the opposition during this legislature and resigned as party leader when a new cabinet was formed. On 6 March, Salvini repeated his campaign message that his party would refuse any coalition with the M5S. On 14 March, Salvini offered to govern with the M5S, imposing the condition that League ally Forza Italia (FI), led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, must also take part in any coalition. Di Maio rejected this proposal on the grounds that Salvini was "choosing restoration instead of revolution" because "Berlusconi represents the past". Moreover, Alessandro Di Battista, a prominent M5S leader, denied any possibility of an alliance with FI, describing Berlusconi as the "pure evil of our country".
The consultations between Mattarella and the major political parties in Italy on 4 and 5 April failed to result in a candidate for the prime minister, forcing Mattarella to hold another round of consultation between 11 and 12 April.
On 18 April, Mattarella tasked the President of the Senate Elisabetta Casellati with trying to reconcile the issues between the centre-right coalition and the M5S in order to break the post-election political deadlock and form a fully functional new government; however, she failed to find a solution to the conflicts between the two groups, especially between FI and the M5S. On 23 April, after Casellati's failure, Mattarella gave an exploratory mandate to the President of the Chamber of Deputies Roberto Fico to try to create a political agreement between the Democratic Party (PD) and the M5S.
A Catholic leftist politician, Mattarella was a leading member of the Christian Democracy party from the early 1980s until its dissolution. He served as Minister for Parliamentary Relations from 1987 to 1989, and Minister of Education from 1989 to 1990. 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. 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. 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.
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 1967, he became a lawyer in Palermo, becoming particularly involved in administrative law. 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.
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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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 March 1989, a maxi-competition for professorships was held for the secondary school. Mattarella reorganized also the teaching programs of two-year high schools, completing the first steps of the so-called "Brocca project", the educational system's revision program, undertaken under his predecessor Giovanni Galloni in 1988. Mattarella also oversaw the overall reform of the elementary school, which made the three teachers' module on two classes universal on 23 May 1990, leading to the overcoming of the traditional single teacher.
On 23 July 1989, Mattarella became Italian Minister of Education in the sixth cabinet of Giulio Andreotti. In January 1990, Mattarella led the first National School Conference, which discussed the renewal of the educational system and addressed the issue of school autonomy. At the end of June 1990, the so-called "anti-drug law" was approved, which mandated health education to schools; the combination of the education system and preventive measures, not only in health matters, was part of the programmatic lines that the minister had drawn. On 27 July 1990, Mattarella resigned from his position, together with other ministers, upon the Italian Parliament's passing in 1990 of the Mammì Act, liberalising the media in Italy, which they saw as a favour to the media magnate Berlusconi.
In 1990, Mattarella was elected deputy secretary of the DC. He left the post two years later to become director of Il Popolo, the official newspaper of the party. Following the 1993 Italian referendum, he drafted the new electoral law nicknamed Mattarellum. The electoral law consisted in a parallel voting system, which act as a mixed system, with 75% of seats allocated using a first-past-the-post electoral system and 25% using proportional representation, with one round of voting.
During those years in the early 1990s, the whole Italian political system was shocked by the Tangentopoli corruption scandal; Mattarella was not directly involved in the scandal. In August 1993, he was among the recipients of an investigation's notification that followed the statements of a Sicilian real estate entrepreneur, who accused him. Mattarella resigned from all his posts and was thanked by Mino Martinazzoli, the then DC leader, who expressed his support to him. Martinazzoli's statement was publicly criticized by Francesco Cossiga because it was in contrast with what was done for other politicians involved in the scandal. Mattarella was later acquitted of the charge.
Mattarella was one of the protagonists of the renewal of the DC after Tangentopoli that would lead in January 1994 to the foundation of the Italian People's Party (PPI). In the ensuing 1994 Italian general election, in which the newly founded PPI fared poorly, Mattarella was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He soon found himself engaged in an internal dispute after the election of new party leader Rocco Buttiglione, who wished to steer the PPI towards an electoral alliance with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI). Following Buttiglione's appointment, Mattarella resigned as director of Il Popolo in opposition to this policy. In a 20 July 1994 interview with l'Unità, Mattarella considered the new political proposal that was taking shape for a new centre-left coalition interesting, "especially for those who are very nostalgic for Aldo Moro's political strategy." In 1995, at the height of the internal conflict within the PPI, he addressed Buttiglione, who was stubbornly seeking an alliance with the political right, as "el general coup leader Roquito Butillone" and defined "an irrational nightmare" the hypothesis that Berlusconi's FI could be accepted into the European People's Party.
Mattarella was one of the first supporters of the economist Romano Prodi at the head of the centre-left coalition known as The Olive Tree in the 1996 Italian general election. After the electoral victory of the centre-left, Mattarella served as leader of the PPI's parliamentary group. Two years later, when the Prodi I Cabinet fell, Mattarella was appointed by Massimo D'Alema as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy with responsibility for the secret services, which he tried to reform. The reform of the secret services proposed by Mattarella collected the indications provided by the Jucci Commission, which had worked extensively on the subject, and aimed at strengthening the political control of the services by the prime minister of Italy, in coordination with the Digis (Government Department of Security Information), by removing power from the Interior Ministry and Defense. It was the basis for the 2007 reform of the secret services.
In December 1999, Mattarella was appointed Italian Minister of Defence in the D'Alema II Cabinet. As Minister of Defence, he supported the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia against the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević; he also approved a reform of the Italian Armed Forces which abolished conscription. After the resignation of D'Alema in 2000, Mattarella kept his position as Minister of Defence in the Amato II Cabinet.
In October 2000, the PPI joined with other centrist parties to form an alliance called The Daisy (DL), later to merge into a single party in March 2002. Mattarella was re-elected to the Italian Parliament in the 2001 and 2006 general elections, standing as a candidate for The Daisy in two successive centre-left coalitions: The Olive Tree and The Union (L'Unione). In 2007, Mattarella was one of the founders of the Democratic Party (PD), a big tent centre-left party formed from a merger of left-wing and centrist parties which had been part of The Olive Tree, including The Daisy and the Democrats of the Left (heirs of the PCI).
On 5 October 2011, Mattarella was elected by the Italian Parliament with 572 votes to be a judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy. He was sworn in on 11 October 2011 and served until he was sworn in as President of the Italian Republic in January 2015.
On 31 January 2015, Mattarella was elected the president of Italy at the fourth ballot with 665 votes out of 1,009, with support from the Democratic Party (PD), New Centre-Right, Civic Choice, Union of the Centre, and Left Ecology Freedom. Mattarella was officially endorsed by the PD after his name was put forward by Matteo Renzi, the prime minister of Italy at the time. He replaced Giorgio Napolitano, who had served for 8 years and 244 days, the longest presidency in the history of the Italian Republic; since Napolitano had resigned on 14 January, Senate president Pietro Grasso was the Acting President at the time of Mattarella's inauguration on 3 February. Mattarella's first statement as new president was thusly: "My thoughts go first and especially to the difficulties and hopes of our fellow citizens."
Mattarella's first presidential visit was on the day of his election, when he visited the Fosse Ardeatine, where during World War II in 1944 the German Nazi occupation troops killed 335 people as a reprisal for an Italian resistance movement attack. Mattarella stated that "Europe and the world must be united to defeat whoever wants to drag us into a new age of terror".
On 16 February 2015, Mattarella appointed Ugo Zampetti as Secretary-General to the Presidency of the Republic, the head of the presidential secretariat. While three days before, on 13 February, the President appointed Giovanni Grasso as his special counselor for press and communication. As of 2023, Zampetti, a civil servant with a long-time experience within Italian politics, and Grasso, a journalist and writer, are still holding their posts.
On 6 May, he signed the new Italian electoral law, known as Italicum, which provides for a two-round system based on party-list proportional representation, corrected by a majority bonus and a 3% election threshold. Candidates run for election in 100 multi-member constituencies with open lists, except for a single candidate chosen by each party who is the first to be elected.
On 4 December 2016, a constitutional referendum was held in Italy. Voters were asked whether they approve a constitutional law that amends the Constitution of Italy to reform the composition and powers of the Parliament of Italy, as well as the division of powers between the state, the regions, and administrative entities. The bill, put forward by then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and his centre-left Democratic Party, was first introduced by the government in the Senate on 8 April 2014. After several amendments were made to the proposed law by both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, the bill received its first approval on 13 October 2015 (Senate) and 11 January 2016 (Chamber of Deputies), and its second and final approval on 20 January (Senate) and 12 April (Chamber of Deputies).
In accordance with Article 138 of the Constitution of Italy, a referendum was called after the formal request of more than one-fifth of the members of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, since the constitutional law had not been approved by a qualified majority of two-thirds in each house of parliament in the second vote. 59.11% of voters voted against the constitutional reform, meaning it did not come into effect. This was the third constitutional referendum in the history of the Italian Republic; the other two were in 2001, in which the amending law was approved, and in 2006, in which it was rejected.
Following the defeat, Prime Minister Renzi resigned. On 11 December, Mattarella appointed the incumbent Minister of Foreign Affairs Paolo Gentiloni as new head of the government. Gentiloni led a government composed by PD, NCD, and other minor centrist parties, the same majority of Renzi's. According to many political analysts and commentators, the appointment of Gentiloni caused tensions between Mattarella and Renzi, who asked the president to dissolve the parliament and call for a snap election in 2017. This version was later confirmed by Renzi during a press conference following the 2018 general election, in which he stated it was an error not to vote in 2017.
The March 2018 election resulted in a hung parliament, with no coalitions able to form a majority of seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The election was seen as a backlash against the Establishment with the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League becoming the two largest parties in the Parliament.
After the election's results were known, Luigi Di Maio, leader of the M5S, and Matteo Salvini, secretary of the League, each urged that Mattarella should give him the task of forming a new cabinet because he led the largest party or coalition, respectively. On 5 March, Matteo Renzi declared the PD to be in the opposition during this legislature and resigned as party leader when a new cabinet was formed. On 6 March, Salvini repeated his campaign message that his party would refuse any coalition with the M5S. On 14 March, Salvini offered to govern with the M5S, imposing the condition that League ally Forza Italia (FI), led by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, must also take part in any coalition. Di Maio rejected this proposal on the grounds that Salvini was "choosing restoration instead of revolution" because "Berlusconi represents the past". Moreover, Alessandro Di Battista, a prominent M5S leader, denied any possibility of an alliance with FI, describing Berlusconi as the "pure evil of our country".
The consultations between Mattarella and the major political parties in Italy on 4 and 5 April failed to result in a candidate for the prime minister, forcing Mattarella to hold another round of consultation between 11 and 12 April.
On 18 April, Mattarella tasked the President of the Senate Elisabetta Casellati with trying to reconcile the issues between the centre-right coalition and the M5S in order to break the post-election political deadlock and form a fully functional new government; however, she failed to find a solution to the conflicts between the two groups, especially between FI and the M5S. On 23 April, after Casellati's failure, Mattarella gave an exploratory mandate to the President of the Chamber of Deputies Roberto Fico to try to create a political agreement between the Democratic Party (PD) and the M5S.
22-25, F
