Oscar Luigi Scalfaro
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Categories: 1918 births | Living people | Italian politicians | Italian Ministers of the Interior | Members of Democrazia Cristiana | People from Novara | Presidents of the Italian Republic | Presidents of the Italian Chamber of Deputies | Italian Life Senators | Italian Roman Catholics
Baron Oscar Luigi Scalfaro IPA: [ˈskalfaro] (born in Novara, September 9, 1918) is an Italian politician and magistrate, member of the Christian Democracy, President of the Italian Republic from 1992 to 1999 and senator for life. BiographyScalfaro was born in Novara, Piedmont. 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. After the end of World War II in 1945 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 graced 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 president of the Italian Republic after a two week stalemate of unsuccessful attempts to reach agreement. The killing of Antimafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone prompted his election. He ended his mandate in 1999, and automatically became a lifetime Senator. In recent times, Scalfaro was the chairman of the committee that advocated the abrogation, in the referendum of June 25th and 26th, 2006, of the constitutional reform that had been passed in parliament the previous year by the former centre-right majority. Along with all the centre-left (and a few centre-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 former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and supports the centre-left coalition that won the political elections of 2006, which includes two communist parties. Despite his age, he also actively campaigned, for the "no" side, in the June 2006 referendum on a constitutional reform proposed by the House of Freedoms during its stay at 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. External links
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