Giulio Andreotti

Biography

Giulio Andreotti was born in Rome in 1919; his father, a primary school teacher, died when he was two. He studied law at the University of Rome while working in a tax office, and through the Catholic student federation FUCI, which he led from 1942 to 1944, he joined the circle of young Catholics who founded Christian Democracy. He also worked as a journalist.

A protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, he sat in the Constituent Assembly from 1946 and in the Chamber of Deputies from 1948 to 1991, and was secretary of the Council of Ministers from 1947 to 1954. Over the following decades he held almost every major ministry, including the interior, finance, treasury, defence from 1959 to 1966, industry, the budget and, from 1983 to 1989, foreign affairs.

He headed seven governments between 1972 and 1992. His 'national solidarity' cabinets of 1976-79 relied on the support of the Communist Party, and when the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro in 1978 he refused to negotiate. In his last government, from 1989 to 1992, he pressed for a timetable for European monetary union, and in 1990 he revealed the existence of the secret NATO stay-behind network Gladio. He was appointed a senator for life in 1991.

From 1993 he was tried in Palermo for association with the Mafia and in Perugia for the 1979 murder of the journalist Mino Pecorelli. He was ultimately acquitted of the murder, while the courts in the Mafia case found his links with Cosa Nostra until 1980 proven but beyond the statute of limitations. He died in Rome in 2013.