Giorgio Napolitano, the former Italian president and one-time communist who helped restore market confidence in the country’s finances in 2011 during Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, has died. He was 98.
Napolitano died on Friday at the Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome, according to newswire Ansa, which did not immediately give a cause of death. Ansa had reported earlier this month that Napolitano had been taken to the hospital.
He had a constant stream of visitors to the Quirinale presidential palace in central Rome, including Pope Francis in 2013 and US President Barack Obama in 2014. Napolitano resigned in early 2015 but retained the title senator for life, an honor he was granted in 2005. The president’s political journey “must be put into the context of the anti-Fascist resistance and postwar Italy,” Riccardo Barbieri, who was the chief European economist at Mizuho International Plc in London, said in 2011. Napolitano was “the leading figure in the reformist wing of the Italian Communist Party and a believer in a transition to a social-democratic position.”
In 1969, Napolitano helped lead a partial break by Western Europe’s largest communist party away from Kremlin hardliners, amid criticism of the Soviet Union’s decision to put down Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring movement the year before.
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