Oscar Luigi Scalfaro

Oscar Luigi Scalfaro

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Oscar Luigi Scalfaro

Baron Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (born September 9, 1918^[1]) is an Italian politician and magistrate, member of the Christian Democracy, President of the Italian Republic from 1992 to 1999, and currently a senator for life. He currently belongs to the centre-left Democratic party.

Biography

Scalfaro was born in Novara, Province of Novara.^[1]

He graduated in Law from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (?Catholic University of the Sacred Heart?) in Milan on June 2, 1942. On October 21, 1942 he entered the magistrature. In 1945, after the end of World War II, he became a public prosecuting attorney, and to date he is the last Italian attorney to have obtained a death sentence (but the accused was pardoned before the execution could take place). In 1946 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly and later in 1948 he became a deputy representing the district of Turin. He was re-elected ten times in a row until 1992.

In May 25, 1992 he was elected as President of the Italian Republic, after a two week stalemate of unsuccessful attempts to reach agreement. The killing of anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone prompted his election. His mandate ended in May 1999, and he automatically became a lifetime member of the Senator.

In recent times, Scalfaro was the chairman of the committee that advocated the abrogation, in the referendum of June 25 and 26, 2006, of the constitutional reform that had been passed in parliament the previous year by the former center-right majority. Along with all the center-left (and a few center-right personalities, too), Scalfaro considered it to be dangerous for national unity and for other reasons. The opponents of the reform won a landslide victory in the referendum.

Scalfaro is currently the eldest living Italian President and the second eldest senator in the Italian Senate, after Rita Levi Montalcini. He consequently took the temporary presidency of the newly-elected assembly which followed the 2006 general election, as Levi Montalcini refused the role because of her age. This made him one of the three politicians in Italian history to have presided over the three highest-ranked offices in the Italian Republic: President of the Republic, President of the Senate, and President of the Chamber of Deputies (the other two are Sandro Pertini and Enrico De Nicola).

A staunch Catholic, and in the past a rather conservative and anti-communist politician, Scalfaro is on very bad terms with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He supported the center-left coalition, which included two communist parties, that won the 2006 election. Despite his age, he also actively campaigned, for the "no" side, in the June 2006 referendum on a constitutional reform proposed by Berlusconi's coalition House of Freedom during its control of the government.

During the Second World War, in 1944, he lost his 20-year-old wife Maria Inzitari. Since then, he has not been married. He has a daughter, Marianna.

After the 2008 parliamentary election, he was again asked to preside as President de tempore after Rita Levi-Montalcini again refused the post, but he too refused to serve.