WORLD LEADERS: heads of state and government

Revista Estilo de Vida Latin America

Sergio Matarella: re-elected to reunite Italy

With the goal of working against corruption and the mafia that murdered his brother Piersanti in 1980, when he served as regional president, this man takes over as Italy’s 12th president.

  Magazin: Estilo de Vida Latin America by Claudia M. Gómez –  Photo: Sergio Matarella

August 15/2022: Sergio Matarella, the re-elected president of Italy, was born in Palermo, in the bosom of a prominent Sicilian family. He started his new government at the end of January 2022, despite not having shown any intention of continuing; however, his permanence was necessary as a solution to the disagreement in which the Italian Parliament, which elects the head of state, found itself in. Eight votes were necessary to reach a consensus; the final decision was to leave everything as it was: Mattarella as President and Mario Draghi as Prime Minister.
He is the son of Bernardo Mattarella, a Christian Democrat politician who was a five-time minister between the 1950s and 1960s, and Maria Buccellato, both from Castellammare del Golfo (TP); he is currently a widower and has three children. But from a very early age, this 81-year-old man knew what politics meant, since his father was not only a renowned anti-fascist who was persecuted by Mussolini’s regime, but also the founder of the Christian Democracy (DC) party.
For this very reason, Sergio studied law at La Sapienza University of Rome, where he graduated with honors, with a thesis on “The Function of Political Orientation” and, in 1967, he enrolled in the bar of the Palermo Forum. Then, in the early 1980s, he began to dabble in politics, for the left-wing faction of the party founded by his father.

BIG STEPS

In the first instance, however, he taught Parliamentary Law at the University of Palermo until 1983, when he went on leave of absence after being elected member of the Chamber of Deputies for the Christian Democracy, in the constituency of Western Sicily, to which he belonged until 2008. His political career was developed within the Catholic-social current of thought and began years ago in the DC.
Mattarella was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Minister of Relations with the Parliament in the government of Ciriaco De Mita from 1988 to 1989 and Minister of Education under Giulio Andreotti from 1989 to 1990, among other positions. And in the seven legislatures in which he was a member of the Chamber, he was a member of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Legislation Committee, which he chaired.
From October 1998 he was Vice-President of the Council of Ministers; and from December 1999 to June 2001, Minister of Defense, a period in which the law abolishing compulsory military service and the law declaring the Carabinieri Arm an autonomous armed force were approved; but also, in which Italy played an intense participation in peace missions deployed at the initiative of the United Nations, and contributed significantly to the peacekeeping and peace interposition operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
In 2011 the Parliament elected him Constitutional Judge, and he joined the Constitutional Court. On January 31, 2015 he was elected twelfth President of the Italian republic, and subsequently on January 29, 2022 he was re-elected to the office, with the slogan that he is the only one who seems to be able to unite Italy, at the moment.