1. In 1994, the year in which he was elected to the secretariat of the Rifondazione Comunista and to the Italian and European parliaments, Fausto Bertinotti resigned all his trade union positions.
17 Facts About Fausto Bertinotti
1. 2.
Fausto Bertinotti remains interested in economics and workers' rights, and has been offered the position of Minister for Labour on several occasions by leaders of the Italian centre-left, but he has always declined it.
3.
Fausto Bertinotti did not readily find a political party during the First Italian Republic which conformed to his principles.
4.
Fausto Bertinotti was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and then the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity before joining the Italian Communist Party, in which he was a member of Pietro Ingrao's tendency.
5.
Fausto Bertinotti was opposed to the dissolution of the PCI in 1991 and the creation by its reformist majority of the Democratic Party of the Left.
6.
Fausto Bertinotti finally broke with PDS leader Achille Occhetto in 1994 and became secretary of the PRC, replacing Sergio Garavini who had led the party since its foundation.
7.
In time Fausto Bertinotti succeeded in winning over the majority of the party base, aided in this by his charismatic oratory.
8.
Fausto Bertinotti was confirmed in the position of party secretary at the third, fourth, fifth and sixth congresses of Rifondazione.
9.
The PRC, weakened by this split, had a poor result in the 1999 European elections, but Fausto Bertinotti was nevertheless elected to the European Parliament.
10.
Since 2001, Fausto Bertinotti has led the party to take more radical, mass-movement positions close to those of the growing alternative globalisation movement, a stance which is opposed by the party's Trotskyist factions.
11.
Fausto Bertinotti declared himself willing to see Prodi chosen without primary elections as the left's joint candidate for the post of prime minister, but when Prodi accepted that primary elections would be necessary, he proposed himself as a candidate.
12.
Fausto Bertinotti was elected member of the European Parliament in 2004 on the Rifondazione Comunista list, in which he was candidate in all five electoral districts, receiving some 380,000 votes in all Italy.
13.
Fausto Bertinotti served as member of the European Left group in the parliament, sitting on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
14.
Fausto Bertinotti was a substitute for the Committee on Legal Affairs and a member of the Delegation to the EU-Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Joint Parliamentary Committee.
15.
In December 2019 Fausto Bertinotti begun a collaboration with the Italian online journal Il Riformista.
16.
Fausto Bertinotti is an icon known to the Italian public for his "aristocratic" public image, mainly conveyed by his French R, his good manners and his elegant sweaters.
17.
Fausto Bertinotti has written a number of political, ideological and trade-union related works:.