Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio

(1920– )

   A life long public servant, the Tuscan Ciampi became governor of the Banca d’Italia in 1979, an appointment that enabled him to warn publicly against the budgetary irresponsibility of the Bettino Craxi and Giulio Andreotti governments of the 1980s. In April 1993, following the collapse of the government headed by Giuliano Amato, Ciampi was President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro’schoice to head an interim administration that would pass a new electoral law and restore calm and international confidence. The first nonparliamentarian ever to be made premier, Ciampi formed a government that included several former Communists in ministerial posts, as well as members of the Democrazia Cristiana/ Christian Democracy Party (DC) and Partito Socialista Italiano/ Italian Socialist Party (PSI) who had been untainted by the scandals that had brought the Amato administration down. This government fell apart even before its ministers had had the chance to take the oath of office when the refusal of the Chamber of Deputies to allow a judicial investigation into the private affairs of Bettino Craxi led to a walk-out by the Partito Democratico della Sinistra/Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Ciampi replaced the PDS’s nominees with nonpartisan technocrats and governed as ably as the circumstances permitted until the election of March 1994.

   In 1995, Ciampi became president of the European Commission’s advisory group on competitiveness, but he was swiftly recalled to Italian politics by Romano Prodi. In May 1996, he was made the treasury and budget minister in the new center-left administration. Ciampi’s prestige proved vital in this role; there is little doubt that Italy would not have qualified for membership of the Euro in 1999 without him. Ciampi’s personal authority was decisive in imposing rigid measures to get Italy’s public finances in better shape and in convincing the European Commission and the other member states of the European Union (EU) to relax the rules to allow Italy to participate. Like Alcide De Gasperi,Antonio Segni,and Emilio Colombo before him, Ciampi has been awarded the Charlemagne prize for services to European unity. Ciampi was the natural choice in May 1999 to succeed Oscar Luigi Scalfaro as president of the Republic and was elected, on the first ballot, by a substantial bipartisan majority. Despite the political tensions arising during the often turbulent 2001–2006 government presided over by Silvio Berlusconi, with whom Ciampi often found himself in personal disagreement, Ciampi’s presidency was a great popular success. In May 2006, politicians on both the right and the left even mooted the possibility that he should be reelected for a second seven-year term as president. Ciampi modestly turned down the offer, however, and is today senator for life in the Italian Parliament.

   See also Currency; European Integration.