In the absence of agreement, Sergio Mattarella agrees to remain president of Italy

This Saturday it was reported that Sergio Mattarella, the 80-year-old Sicilian jurist who has been the head of the Italian State since January 31, 2015, will be elected President of the Republic again, by the Italian Parliament, after politics has shown an absolute inability to find a better solution.

He had insisted on several occasions in recent months that he did not want to renew for another seven-year term and even in his New Year’s speech he said goodbye to the Italians to make way for a new figure from February who would perform the functions of President of the Republic , and thus be able to dedicate himself exclusively to his family.

In fact, Mattarella had stated that a renewal in office, as happened with Giorgio Napolitano in 2013, should be an exception and not become the norm, but the parties have been unable to find a consensus and have once again opted for the jurist Sicilian to get out of the blockade, which was also slowing down government activity.

Mattarella will become the second head of state to renew his mandate, after Napolitano, who did not want to either but repeated in 2013 also due to the inefficiency of the policy, although in 2015 he resigned and was replaced by Mattarella.

Born in Palermo on July 23, 1941 and the father of three children, Mattarella was a judge of the Constitutional Court and several times a minister, before being the highest authority of the Italian State.

As President of the Republic, he always kept a low profile, but his discreet nature did not prevent him from using the powerful prerogatives of his position when necessary, such as when in 2018 he prevented the first government of Giuseppe Conte, made up of the far-right League and the The 5-Star Movement (M5S) will appoint Eurosceptic Paolo Savona as Minister of Economy.

Graduated in Law in 1964 from the La Sapienza University of Rome with the highest qualification and honors, Mattarella taught Parliamentary Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Palermo until 1983, the year in which he was placed on leave of absence due to his entry into the Chamber of Deputies.

Three years earlier, in 1980, the Cosa Nostra mafia had murdered his brother Piersanti Mattarella when he was president of the Sicily region with the Christian Democracy (DC) party.

In 1983, Mattarella was elected as a deputy for DC and remained a member of the Chamber of Deputies until 2008.

In those seven legislatures he was a member of the Constitutional Affairs Commission, the Foreign Affairs Commission and the Legislation Commission, of which he was also president.

Between 1987 and 1989 he was Minister of Relations with Parliament, and between 1989 and 1990 he was Minister of Education, but that year he resigned from the government of Giulio Andreotti, rejecting the approval of the Mammì law, which reorganized television channels and granted three of them to Mediaset, audiovisual giant of the Berlusconi family.

Already in October 1998 he was elected Vice President of the Council of Ministers until December 1999, when he was appointed Defense Minister, a position he held until the June 2001 elections.

In those years, the law was passed that abolished compulsory military service and turned the carabinieri into an autonomous armed force, but Italy also played a very active role in the peacekeeping missions deployed for United Nations initiatives in places as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Mattarella was also the promoter of the old electoral system known as “Mattarellum”, with which elections were held between 1994 and 2001.

In 2008 he left political life, a year later he was elected by Parliament as a member of the Presidential Council for Administrative Justice, and in 2011 he was appointed judge of the Constitutional Court. (I)