40 Facts About Massimo D'Alema

Massimo D'Alema was Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2008.

Massimo D'Alema was supportive of Achille Occhetto's turning point that dissolved the PCI and established the PDS, and he presided over the establishment of The Olive Tree coalition that won the 1996 Italian general election and the transformation of the PDS into the Democrats of the Left in 1998, the same year he became prime minister.

Massimo D'Alema joined the Democratic Party upon its foundation in 2007.

Massimo D'Alema opposed Matteo Renzi's secretariat and was contrasted with the Renziani wing within the party, which he left in 2017 to become a founder of Article One.

Massimo D'Alema was born in Rome on 20 April 1949, the son of Giuseppe Massimo D'Alema, a partisan in the Italian resistance movement within the Patriotic Action Groups and communist politician, and Fabiola Modesti.

Massimo D'Alema joined the Italian Communist Party at the age of 14 and began his political career in Pisa, where he was studying philosophy.

Massimo D'Alema was praised as enfant prodige by the then PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti and took part to the protests of 1968, alongside his friend Fabio Mussi.

In 1975, Massimo D'Alema was elected national secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation.

From 1988 to 1990, Massimo D'Alema was the director of L'Unita, formerly the official newspaper of the PCI, which subsequently became the newspaper of the DS.

Massimo D'Alema explained how the press had lost its historical references, namely a solid political system, which guaranteed clarity of alignment, and how what he described as the new anarchy that emerged bore the sign of the "unqualified destructuring of the political democracy".

Massimo D'Alema entered the PCI's national secretariat in 1986 and supported the transformation into the Democratic Party of the Left, which was launched by Achille Occhetto and made official by the Rimini party congress in February 1991.

Massimo D'Alema was a notable member of the PCI, the bulk of which in 1991 became the PDS and in 1998 formed the Democrats of the Left.

Massimo D'Alema embodied an anthropological turning point, where the Leninist concept of professional revolutionaries was rejected in favour of salaried party executives comparable to public administrators and union officials.

Massimo D'Alema was a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies since 1987 and president of the PDS parliamentary group from 1992 to 1994.

In February 1998, the start of the formation process of the DS, which was led by Massimo D'Alema, was concluded with the merge of the PDS, the Labour Federation, the Movement of Unitarian Communists, the Social Christians, and exponents of the republican left.

Massimo D'Alema became prime minister when the PRC retired its support of Prodi's government, and led to a new centre-left government, including the Democratic Union for the Republic and the Party of Italian Communists, the latter being a split from the PRC in disagreement over the fall of Prodi's government.

Massimo D'Alema became prime minister thanks to Francesco Cossiga and part of the right-wing opposition, after the crisis of the first Prodi government.

The first Massimo D'Alema government continued on the path of financial recovery and privatization, as well as the reform of the welfare state.

Massimo D'Alema supported Italy's commitment in the NATO air intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in favour of Kosovo.

At the 2001 party congress, Massimo D'Alema supported the candidacy for the secretariat of Piero Fassino against Giovanni Berlinguer at the head of a minority motion promoted and supported by Cofferati and the CGIL.

In 1999, Massimo D'Alema managed to summon five other heads of state and government to Florence: Clinton, Blair, Lionel Jospin, Gerhard Schroeder, and Fernando Cardoso, among other personalities, from Hillary Clinton to Prodi, who was the then president of the European Commission.

In those years, Massimo D'Alema followed the Third Way and invited entrepreneurs to grow, invest, and get rich.

Massimo D'Alema urged them to report the obstacles encountered in their path so that the government could "get them out of the way".

At the 1999 congress of the Federation of the Greens, Massimo D'Alema outlined what would later become the Democratic Party.

Massimo D'Alema did not believe in that project because he was convinced that Italy is a structurally right-wing country, that in a majoritarian system an ex-Communist party alone would never be able to govern, and that even if it succeeded in doing so, the Italian media information system would end up destroying it.

Since the 2004 European Parliament election in Italy, Massimo D'Alema was a member of the European Parliament for Southern Italy with the DS, as part of the Party of European Socialists group, and sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Fisheries and the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs until April 2006, when he stood down following his election to the Chamber of Deputies in Italy.

Massimo D'Alema himself stepped back, endorsing the official candidate of The Union, Giorgio Napolitano, who was ultimately elected.

Immediately following the April 2006 election, Massimo D'Alema was proposed as the future president of the Chamber of Deputies.

That same month, Massimo D'Alema was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs in the second Prodi government.

Massimo D'Alema was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies in this election as part of the newly formed PD.

The DS was one of the main founding parties of the PD, and Massimo D'Alema himself was a protagonist of the constituent phase.

In 2010, Massimo D'Alema was elected president of the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic, a position he held until 2013, and of the Foundation of European Progressive Studies.

In 2012, when the PD experimented American-style primaries, Massimo D'Alema wanted to defend the old party traditions, and he disagreed with the idea to convert the historic workers' party to the practices of Barack Obama's politics as supported by Veltroni.

Massimo D'Alema became an Extraordinary Professor at Link Campus University, and continued his work as president of the Italianieuropei Foundation and director of the magazine of the same name, which he founded in 1998.

Massimo D'Alema was briefly a member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2006.

Since 30 June 2010, Massimo D'Alema is the president of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the European political foundation of the PES.

Massimo D'Alema was a friend of the Italian Freemason and banker Vincenzo De Bustis.

Massimo D'Alema pledged Italy's willingness to enforce the United Nations resolution on Lebanon and urged other European Union member states to do the same because the stability of the Middle East should be a chief concern for Europeans.

Massimo D'Alema is married to Linda Giuva, a professor at the University of Siena, and has two children, Giulia and Francesco.

Massimo D'Alema published many books, several of which with Mondadori, which is controlled by Fininvest, the family holding company of Silvio Berlusconi, whose first government he staunchly opposed.