D’Alema, Massimo

(1949– )

   Massimo D’Alema has been a leading national figure in Italian politics since the summer of 1994. D’Alema’s early career was spent in the party organization of the former Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI), first as head of the party’s youth federation, then as a member of the party secretariat, then as a parliamentary deputy, and as managing director of L’Unita, the PCI’s daily newspaper, between 1988 and 1990. As deputy leader of the PCI during the traumatic years 1989–1991, when the PCI experienced a profound identity crisis following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, D’Alema played a crucial role in the party’s transformation into the Partito Democratico della Sinistra /Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). When D’Alema took over as leader of the PDS from Achille Occhetto in 1994, many regarded him as an uninspired choice who would reflect the wishes of the party bureaucracy. It has instead become clear that D’Alema is one of the few contemporary Italian politicians with vision. As the title of a book of his speeches proclaimed, he envisages Italy becoming “a normal country.” He interprets this as meaning that Italy must develop constitutional arrangements in which the government has the power to implement its policies without being held hostage by minority parties in Parliament, in which there is a genuine social market economy without the deformations of patronage politics, and in which there is alternation in power between a center-left party and a center-right party. D’Alema’s support was crucial both for the formation of the Olive Tree Coalition in 1995 and also for the broadening of the PDS in 1998 to create the Democratici di Sinistra/Democrats of the Left (DS), of which he became president. In 1997, D’Alema chaired an important bicameral commission of Parliament that had the task of rewriting the Constitution of 1948. The bicameral commission drew up a draft constitution after months of political wrangling, but then failed when Silvio Berlusconi ceased to cooperate in the process. D’Alema was widely criticized on the left for his willingness to negotiate with Berlusconi. Despite this setback, D’Alema replaced Romano Prodi as prime minister in October 1998 and headed two litigious governments between then and the spring of 2000. In May 2006, after being talked of as a candidate for president of the Republic, he became foreign minister in the newly elected center-left government.