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Giorgio Napolitano is an Italian politician who has been the 11th President of Italy since 2006. He is the longest-serving President in the history of the Italian Republic, and is the only one to have been re-elected to the office. Due to his domination on Italian politics, media often refer to him as Re Giorgio.
A long-time member of the Italian Communist Party, Napolitano was a leading proponent of a modernizing faction on the right of the party. First elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1953, he took an assiduous interest in parliamentary life and went on to serve as President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994. He was Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998 under Romano Prodi.
Napolitano was appointed a Senator for life in 2005 by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In May 2006, he was elected by parliament as President of Italy. During his first term of office, he oversaw governments both of the centre-left and the centre-right, led by Prodi and by Silvio Berlusconi, respectively. In November 2011, when Berlusconi resigned from his post as Prime Minister amid increasingly dramatic financial and economic conditions Napolitano, in keeping with his constitutional role, chose to ask former EU commissioner Mario Monti to seek parliamentary approval of a cabinet composed of unelected professionals, which became widely referred to as a "government of the president".
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