ROME: Former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, a former communist who helped to steer his nation via a debt disaster in 2011, has died on the age of 98, the prime minister’s workplace mentioned on Friday (Sep 22).
Napolitano additionally cast an in depth relationship with the late Pope Benedict XVI, and was one of many few folks to have been warned prematurely of Benedict’s shock resignation in February 2013.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s workplace expressed the Italian authorities’s condolences to Napolitano’s household.
The Italian presidency is normally largely ceremonial, however Napolitano used his powers in late 2011 to stave off disaster by naming the previous European Fee technocrat Mario Monti to guide a authorities following the resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a dispute over spending cuts.
Two years later, he broke one other deadlock when he put in a grand coalition underneath centre-left politician Enrico Letta after an inconclusive parliamentary election.
Napolitano grew to become president in 2006 and was elected for an unprecedented second seven-year time period in 2013. He stepped down in 2015, citing his age.
Throughout a political profession that began within the early Nineteen Fifties, he was elected to the Italian and European parliament and served as inside minister and speaker of the decrease home of parliament.