Sergio Mattarella was reelected as president of Italy

the italian president Sergio Mattarella was re-elected this Saturday by Parliament, after a voting marathon that revealed the divisions of the government coalition in a crucial period of post-pandemic economic recovery.

Deputies broke into applause when the 80-year-old president, whose first term ends on February 3, received the necessary votes for a second seven-year term, in the eighth round of a vote that has bitterly divided the government of national unity in Rome.

Mattarella was re-elected for a seven-year term, reaching a majority of 505 votes out of a total of 1,009 senators, deputies and regional leaders authorized to participate in the vote, which has not yet concluded.

After weeks of uncertainty, Mattarella, the only possible candidate to repeat in office, agreed to continue in the position. although it was a hypothesis that was not in their plans, they confirmed the formations themselves. And it is that Mattarella had advanced that he wanted to retire to dedicate himself to his family.

Mattarella will become the second head of state to repeat in office, after Giorgio Napolitano, who did it in 2013, despite the fact that he had said on several occasions that he wanted to retire. In 2015 he was replaced by Mattarella.

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

As President of the Republic, he always maintained a low profile, but his discreet character did not prevent him use the powerful prerogatives who has his position when it was necessary, as when prevented in 2018 the first government of Giuseppe Conte, formed by the far-right League and the 5 Star Movement (M5S), from appointing the eurosceptic Paolo Savona as Minister of Economy.

Graduated in Law in 1964 at 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 for his entry into the Chamber of Deputies.

Three years earlier, in 1980, the Cosa Nostra mafia asesinó to su hermano Piersanti Mattarella when he was president of the Region of Sicily with the Christian Democracy (DC) party.

In 1983, Mattarella was elected 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 Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee and Legislation Committee, 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, as a rejection of the approval of the Mammì law, which reorganized television channels and awarded three of them to Mediaset, the Berlusconi family’s audiovisual giant.

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 abolished compulsory military service and converted 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 such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Mattarella was also the ipromoter 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.

(With information from EFE and AFP)

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