Francesco Cossiga

Biography

Francesco Cossiga was born in Sassari in 1928 to a republican, anti-fascist family; he was a distant cousin of the Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer. He finished secondary school at sixteen, joined Christian Democracy the following year, graduated in law at nineteen and began teaching constitutional law at the University of Sassari.

Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1958, he became the youngest under-secretary of defence in 1966, minister for public administration in 1974 and minister of the interior in February 1976. As the 'iron minister' he reorganised the police and intelligence services and sent armoured vehicles against the 1977 riots in Bologna. When the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro in March 1978 he ran the government's crisis committees; after Moro's body was found on 9 May he resigned.

He was prime minister from August 1979 to October 1980, a period that included the Bologna station bombing, and became president of the Senate in 1983. In 1985 he was elected President of the Republic on the first ballot with broad support. In his last years in office he attacked the parties and the judiciary in a stream of provocative statements, and after the revelation of the Gladio stay-behind network, which he acknowledged helping to set up, the opposition sought his impeachment. He resigned in April 1992, shortly before his term ended.

As a former president he sat in the Senate for life and led the small Democratic Union for the Republic and Union for the Republic parties around 1998-2001. He died in Rome in August 2010.