1. Benedetto "Bettino" Craxi was an Italian politician and statesman, leader of the Italian Socialist Party from 1976 to 1993, and the 45th prime minister of Italy from 1983 to 1987.
53 Facts About Bettino Craxi
1. 2.
Bettino Craxi was the first PSI member to become prime minister and the second from a socialist party to hold the office.
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Bettino Craxi led the third-longest government in the Italian Republic and he is considered one of the most powerful and prominent politicians of the First Italian Republic.
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Bettino Craxi always rejected the charges of corruption while admitting to the illegal funding that permitted costly political activity, the PSI being less financially powerful than the two larger parties, Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party.
5.
Bettino Craxi maintained strong links with many leaders of the Western European left, including Francois Mitterrand, Felipe Gonzalez, Andreas Papandreou, and Mario Soares, and was one of the main representatives of Western European socialism.
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Bettino Craxi was often nicknamed by his detractors due to his physical size.
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Bettino Craxi's father Vittorio Craxi was a Sicilian lawyer and anti-fascist who was persecuted by the regime of Benito Mussolini while his mother Maria Ferrari was a housewife from Sant'Angelo Lodigiano.
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Bettino Craxi's father stood in the 1948 Italian general election for the Popular Democratic Front, a political alliance between the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party.
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Bettino Craxi campaigned for his father and later joined the PSI at the age of 17.
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Bettino Craxi was precocious and rose to many levels of public office at an early age.
11.
Meanwhile, he attended the faculty of Law in University of Milan and then the faculty of Political Science in Urbino, Bettino Craxi founded the "Socialist University Nucleus" joining the "New University" group and adhering to the CUDI, the student group that supported the left-wing forces.
12.
In 1963 he was appointed leader of the Milan Provincial Secretariat of the PSI and in 1965 Bettino Craxi became a member of the National Leadership.
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In 1966, with the formation of the Unified Socialist Party, a political alliance between the Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party, Bettino Craxi became provincial secretary of the PSU in Milan, along with by the social democrat Enrico Rizzi and Renzo Peruzzotti.
14.
In 1970 after the end of the PSU alliance, Bettino Craxi became Vice Secretary of the PSI, as proposed by Giacomo Mancini.
15.
In 1972 with the re-election of Francesco De Martino as National Secretary of the Socialist Party during the Genoa Congress, Bettino Craxi was confirmed with Giovanni Mosca in the role of Deputy Secretary, receiving the commission to treat the international relations of the party.
16.
Bettino Craxi was appointed to the vacant position of National Secretary of the party, ending years of factional fighting within the PSI.
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Bettino Craxi always opposed the Historic Compromise policy of Moro and Berlinguer, a political alliance and an accommodation between the Christian Democrats and the Communists; the alliance would inevitably make the Socialists politically irrelevant.
18.
Bettino Craxi outlined for a line of alternation between the DC and the left wing, represented by his party, due to the close relations between the PCI and the Soviet Union.
19.
Bettino Craxi was the only political leader, together with Amintore Fanfani and Marco Pannella, to declare himself available to a "humanitarian solution" that would allow the liberation of Christian Democrat statesman, drawing heavy criticism on the so-called "party of firmness", primarily driven by the Communists.
20.
Bettino Craxi chose a red carnation to represent the new course of the party, in honour of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.
21.
In July 1978, following the resignation of President Giovanni Leone, after a lengthy parliamentary battle, Bettino Craxi was able to bring together a large number of votes, electing Sandro Pertini, as new President; Pertini was the first Socialist to hold this position.
22.
Bettino Craxi became the first Socialist in the history of the Italian Republic to be appointed Prime Minister, and the third member of a social democratic party in the history of unified Italy to hold the post.
23.
Bettino Craxi led the third longest-lived government of Italy during the republican era and had strong influence in Italian politics throughout the 1980s; for a time, he was a close ally of two key figures of Christian Democracy, Giulio Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, in a loose cross-party alliance often dubbed CAF.
24.
Bettino Craxi had a firm grasp on a party previously troubled by factionalism, and tried to distance it from the Communists and to bring it closer to Christian Democrats and other parties; his objective was to create an Italian version of European reformist socialist parties, like the German SPD or the French Socialist Party.
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Against trade union resistance, the Bettino Craxi government reacted by abolishing wage-price indexation, under which wages had been increased automatically in line with inflation.
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Bettino Craxi successfully boosted the country's GNP and controlled inflation.
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In 1984, Bettino Craxi signed an agreement with the Vatican City that revised the Lateran Treaty.
28.
Rare footage of Bettino Craxi trying to lay flowers at the tomb of Salvador Allende has been unearthed from RAI's archives.
29.
Bettino Craxi played a role in the 1987 seizure of power in Tunisia by Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
30.
Internationally, Bettino Craxi is perhaps best remembered for an incident in October 1985, when he refused the request of US President Ronald Reagan to extradite the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro.
31.
Bettino Craxi ordered Italian troops to surround the US Forces protecting the plane.
32.
The alternative which Bettino Craxi had wanted so much was taking shape: the idea of a "Social Unity" with the other left-wing political parties, including the PCI, proposed by Bettino Craxi in 1989 after the fall of communism.
33.
Bettino Craxi believed that the collapse of communism in eastern Europe had undermined the PCI and made Social Unity inevitable.
34.
In July 1992, Bettino Craxi finally realised the situation was serious and that he himself was going to be hit by the unfolding scandal.
35.
Bettino Craxi made an appeal before the Chamber of Deputies in which he claimed that everyone knew of the widespread irregularities in the public financing of Italian parties, accused the deputies of hypocrisy and cowardice, and called for all MPs to protect the Socialists from prosecution as a show of solidarity.
36.
The authorisation was denied on 29 April 1993 after Bettino Craxi gave an emotional speech.
37.
In December 1993, after his prosecution was finally authorised, Bettino Craxi was called to testify alongside Cristian Democracy party secretary Arnaldo Forlani before Justice Antonio Di Pietro.
38.
Bettino Craxi's defence was therefore not to declare himself innocent, but everybody guilty.
39.
In 2012, Di Pietro admitted that Bettino Craxi was right when during the Enimont trials he accused the PCI to have received illegal funding from the Soviet Union.
40.
Bettino Craxi's sentences seemed to him "criminally relevant", but Di Pietro omitted to investigate that crime.
41.
Bettino Craxi's lifestyle was perceived to be inappropriate for the secretary of a party with so many alleged financial problems: he lived in the Raphael, an expensive hotel in Rome's centre, and had a large villa in Hammamet, Tunisia.
42.
Bettino Craxi's friends included Siad Barre, president of Somalia; Yasser Arafat, leader of PLO; and Ben Ali, president of Tunisia.
43.
Bettino Craxi's entourage was famously criticised by Formica as a "court of midgets and dancers", indicating the often ludicrous and immoral traits of a system based on personal acquaintance rather than merit.
44.
Bettino Craxi was known for never apologising, as a matter of principle; most Italians expected an apology after the corrupt system had been exposed.
45.
Bettino Craxi never apologised, stating he had done nothing that everybody else had not been doing, and that he was being unjustly singled out and persecuted.
46.
Bettino Craxi was succeeded by two Socialist trade unionists, first Giorgio Benvenuto and then by Ottaviano Del Turco.
47.
The party was disbanded on 13 November 1994 after two years, in which almost all of its longtime leaders, especially Bettino Craxi, were involved in Tangentopoli and decided to leave politics.
48.
Bettino Craxi escaped the laws he had once contributed to make, by fleeing to Hammamet, Tunisia, in 1994; he remained a fugitive there, protected by the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, his personal friend.
49.
Bettino Craxi repeatedly declared himself innocent but never returned to Italy where he had been sentenced to 27 years in jail because of his corruption crimes; of these, 9 years and 8 months were upheld on appeal.
50.
Bettino Craxi died on 19 January 2000, at the age of 65, from complications of diabetes.
51.
Bettino Craxi's funeral took place at the Cathedral of St Vincent de Paul in Tunis and saw a large participation of the local population.
52.
Bettino Craxi's supporters came outside the Tunisian cathedral and targeted Lamberto Dini and Marco Minniti, representatives of the Italian government, with insults and a launch of coins.
53.
Bettino Craxi's tomb is in the small Christian cemetery in Hammamet.