Matteo Renzi

Biography

Matteo Renzi was born in Florence in 1975 and grew up in Rignano sull'Arno, where his father was a Christian Democrat councillor. He attended the Dante Alighieri classical lyceum in Florence and graduated in law from the University of Florence in 1999, then worked for his family's marketing firm. He joined the Italian People's Party in 1996, becoming its provincial secretary, and moved with its members into the Daisy party.

In 2004, aged 29, he was elected president of the Province of Florence, the youngest in Italy, and in 2009 he became mayor of Florence for the Democratic Party. Calling for generational renewal, he earned the nickname 'the Scrapper', lost the 2012 centre-left primary to Pier Luigi Bersani, and in December 2013 won the party leadership with 68 percent of the primary vote.

In February 2014 he pushed Enrico Letta out and became, at 39, Italy's youngest prime minister. His government passed the Jobs Act labour reform, a new electoral law, public administration reform and civil unions for same-sex couples. After voters rejected his constitutional reform in the referendum of 4 December 2016, he resigned as prime minister. He was re-elected party secretary in 2017 but stepped down after the Democratic Party's defeat in the 2018 general election, in which he was elected to the Senate.

In September 2019 he left the Democratic Party and founded the centrist Italia Viva. In January 2021 he withdrew the party's support from Giuseppe Conte's second government, causing its fall, and backed the national unity government of Mario Draghi. He has continued to lead Italia Viva and to sit in the Senate.