Giuliano Ferrara (born 7 January 1952) is an Italian journalist, television presenter, and former politician. He is the founding editor of Il Foglio. Born into a communist and anti-fascist family, Ferrara took part in the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973, he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and carried out political activity within the PCI, and at the same time dedicated himself to journalism, collaborating with Corriere della Sera since 1982 with the column "Bretelle Rosse". Later in the 1980s, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), with which he became a member of the European Parliament (1989–1994).
After the dissolution of the PSI in 1994, Ferrara joined Silvio Berlusconi's political party Forza Italia (FI); he was Minister for Parliamentary Relations in the first Berlusconi government (1994–1995) and then focused on his journalistic career, founding Il Foglio in 1996, the same year he also became for a year the editor-in-chief of the Berlusconi-owned news magazine Panorama. Ferrara returned to active politics in 2007, re-opening the debate on the topic of abortion and proposing an international moratorium. In the 2008 Italian general election, he was a candidate at the Chamber of Deputies with the electoral alliance he founded in the same year, the Association for the Defense of Life. Abortion? No Thanks; he was not elected due to his list not having reached the election threshold.
During his career, Ferrara gained widespread popularity as a commentator and television presenter, also earning satire. He brought sensational and provocative investigative journalism to television, including Linea rovente (1987), Il testimone (1988), Il gatto (1989), L'istruttoria (1991), Diario di guerra (e pace) (2001), Otto e mezzo (2002–2008), and Qui Radio Londra (2011). In 2015, he stepped down as editor-in-chief of Il Foglio. He also published various essays.
Early life, family, and education Born in Rome on 7 January 1952, the son of Maurizio Ferrara (1921–2000) and Marcella De Francesco (1920–2002), Ferrara comes from a Jewish family on the father's side; both his parents were anti-fascist and communists. His father was a member of the Senate of the Republic with the PCI, director of l'Unità, and president of Lazio, while his mother was a communist anti-fascist partisan within the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica and long-time personal secretary of PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti before becoming editor-in-chief of the communist magazine Rinascita. Also active in politics was his grandfather Mario Ferrara, a liberal-inspired lawyer who had defended anti-fascist activists before the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State during the Fascist Italy years and later worked as columnist for Il Mondo of Mario Pannunzio and Corriere della Sera.
From 1958 to 1961, Ferrara lived in Moscow, where his father was a correspondent for l'Unità. He did not return to Moscow until 1990. He also never went to a Communist state after 1961 and preferred holidays in Capri and Paris. Having returned to Italy towards the end of the 1960s, he obtained his liceo classico diploma at the high school in Rome named after Lucretius. Ferrara joined politics during the protests of 1968, participating at the Battle of Valle Giulia on 1 March 1968. In this period, he also had experience in the world of entertainment as a chorister in the first rock opera created in Italy, Then an Alley by Tito Schipa Jr. with music by Bob Dylan. In his trip to New York with his brother, Giacomo Ferrara (1947–2023), in November 1970, in his own words "when Charles de Gaulle died' is the memory of the teenager who knows everything about Dylan by heart and loves the strong politicians", he assisted Luca Ronconi in directing Orlando Furioso.
Ferrara joined the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he had engaged in polemics with Lucio Colletti, in the words of Ferrara "still a bit of a Trotskyist and supporter of Soviet democracy". Ferrara supported Togliatti's "Italian Road to Socialism". Despite this, the two became friends, and Ferrara described Colletti as "soon courageously convert[ing] to the theory of the crisis of Marxism and become a former communist [turned] liberal anti-communist, a little crazy, like his student, but tough." He remained in Turin until September 1982, with his philosophy exams stuck at eleven out of twenty.
Career Journalism and Italian Communist Party (1973–1982) During the 1970s, Ferrara joined the PCI and first started working as an activist militant with Giancarlo Pajetta, who then sent him to Turin, where he arrived on 5 November 1973, to "go to the working class school and escape the dangers of the Roman Curia". Also in Turin, he became a journalist without training and without being a member of the Italian Order of Journalists; he worked at the fortnightly magazine Nuova Società, created by Diego Novelli, who in 1975 became mayor of Turin, and then directed by Saverio Vertone. During this period, he was friend with Novelli, Vertone (Ferrara described it as a "true friendship, which continues despite his honest and delusional political follies"), and Adalberto Minucci. Ferrara was the head of the political organization of the PCI at Fiat Mirafiori, which he led to two thousand members, and then was the responsible for the state problems section (fight against terrorism), the cultural section, and the city committee, which represented the organization of the local PCI in Turin. Ferrara was a well known critic of Turin's workerist tradition and the policy of the Chamber of Labor that led to the November 1980 agreement between Fiat and the CGIL. Having learned the Turinese language, he coordinated political meetings in the small room of the federal committee of Turin under a large reproduction of Guernica, with Luciano Violante and Gian Carlo Caselli; one of the major themes discussed was the fight against terrorism. In an article for la Repubblica entitled the "Right to Inform", after the launch of the anti-terrorism questionnaire, he denounced the Red Brigades.
Within the PCI, Ferrara was responsible for the Fiat provincial coordination for the PCI of Turin in 1973, when he also started writing for Nuova Società. He was responsible for the school and culture sector in 1977 and then became city secretary in 1979. On 8 June 1980, Ferrara was elected municipal councilor in Turin, becoming the CPI group leader in December 1980. With the start of the 1982 Lebanon War, Ferrara was appointed by Novelli as the mayor's delegate for relief to the population of Beirut. On 18 September 1982 in Piazza San Carlo in Turin, the municipality organized the musical event Mille musicisti per la pace (A Thousand Musicians for Peace) with Luciano Berio performing "Accordo". For the occasion, Ferrara, ten minutes before the start, asked both Berio and the then culture councilor Giorgio Balmas that the concert be dedicated to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre but was refused. At the end of the concert, he made the episode public and a public controversy arose; Balmas and Berio defended themselves, stating that it was not appropriate to open with a mini-rally, while Ferrara first relaunched his request on the evening of 19 September 1982, this time at the opening of the reply and supported by the Teatro Stabile director Mario Missiroli. When faced with the new refusal, he left the PCI on 20 September 1982 while remaining a councilor. After the meeting of the Turinese PCI board of directors on 22 September 1982, Ferrara also resigned as a councilor. For the PCI, Ferrara's request was legitimate but his behavior in the matter was not, which is why his resignation was accepted. Ferrara formally remained a Turin city councilor until 25 October 1982, despite the fact that the city council had unanimously rejected his resignation on 4 October 1982.
L'Espresso, Corriere della Sera, and Italian Socialist Party (1982–1987) After his exit from the PCI, Ferrara began to collaborate with the weekly L'Espresso, where he criticized the PCI from the point of view of migliorismo, being known for his closeness to Giorgio Napolitano and his political positions. In 1985, he was approached by the PSI through Claudio Martelli, intending to absorb all the Turinese Amenodolians who had left the PCI. Ferrara denied the rumors that he was joining the PSI but at the same time was keen to reiterate that he considered "the basic choices of Craxi and the socialists as the most right for the country and for the left". A press conference had already been scheduled for 28 February 1985; it would have announced Ferrara's entry into the PSI and his candidacy in the 1985 Turin municipal election. At the last moment, he preferred to avoid the electoral commitment. Ferrara later stated several times that he had abandoned the communist ideology "in unsuspecting times", that is, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Journalist Marco Travaglio argued that this and his other political positions were instead dictated by convenience, as Bettino Craxi was the prime minister of Italy at that time; he said that they were determined from time to time by following where the "power and money" are and that Ferrara had sided "with the thieves ... in fact the thieves earned much more than the judges".
During the 1980s, Ferrara began working for Corriere della Sera, signing articles with the pseudonym Piero Dall'Ora and creating the column "Bretelle Rosse". At the same time, he joined the editorial staff of Reporter, a socialist investigative newspaper directed by Adriano Sofri and Enrico Deaglio, two former leaders of Lotta Continua. In 2003, the same year he also wrote his autobiography on Il Foglio, Ferrara declared that he had been a paid confidant of the CIA in the mid-1980s. The disciplinary action brought against him by the Italian Order of Journalists to determine the compatibility between the profession and collaboration with a secret service was not followed up, both due to the expiry of the five-year period "beyond which, according to the law professional no. 69/1963, the statute of limitations applies for an act susceptible to disciplinary sanction", and because at the time of the events he was not a professional journalist.
Television debut and member of the European Parliament (1987–1994) On 10 November 1987, Ferrara made his television debut on Rai 3 with Linea rovente. He followed on 13 April 1988 on Rai 2 with Il testimone, which saw the implementation of infotainment in Italy. Starting on 13 February 1989, with a contract that guaranteed him a high salary, Ferrara moved to Fininvest, Berlusconi's holding company, to present Radio Londra on Canale 5. On 12 April 1989, he also hosted on Canale 5 the programme Il gatto. Two months later in the 1989 European Parliament election in Italy, he was elected a member of the European Parliament for the PSI.
On 7 January 1991, Ferrara returned to Canale 5 with Radio Londra. On 21 January 1991, he made his debut on Italia 1 with L'instruttoria, in which Ferrara expressed his critical positions towards the judiciary's investigations into the Tangentopoli case. Since 10 February 1992, after a preview on 20 January, he hosted Lezioni d'amore on Italia 1 with his wife Anselma Dell'Olio; it focused on sex and was inspired by the film Love Meetings by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The programme became a political case and after ten days was canceled by Berlusconi under pressure from Christian Democracy (DC) politicians.
Minister in the first Berlusconi government and Il Foglio (1994–1997)