Massimo D'Alema (; born 20 April 1949) is an Italian politician and journalist who was the 53rd prime minister of Italy from 1998 to 2000. He was Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2008. D'Alema also served for a time as national secretary of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Earlier in his career, D'Alema was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and was the first former Communist party member to become prime minister of a NATO country and the only former PCI prime minister of Italy. Due to his first name and for his dominant position in the left-wing coalitions during the Second Republic, he is referred to as Leader Maximo ("Maximum Leader"). He is also the author of several books.
A member of the PCI since 1963, D'Alema was a member of the party's central committee and then of the leadership and party secretariat; from 1975 to 1980, he was also secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). He was supportive of Achille Occhetto's turning point that dissolved the PCI and established the PDS, and he presided over the establishment of The Olive Tree coalition that won the 1996 Italian general election and the transformation of the PDS into the Democrats of the Left (DS) in 1998, the same year he became prime minister. A member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies from 1987 to 2004 and then from 2006 to 2013, he was also a member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2006. He joined the Democratic Party (PD) upon its foundation in 2007. He opposed Matteo Renzi's secretariat and was in contrast with the Renziani wing within the party, which he left in 2017 to become a founder of Article One. He has also been an adviser and mediator in the weapon economic sector.*(IT) Vendita di armi alla Colombia: la risposta di D'Alema, La7 (May 5, 2025)
Early life and education D'Alema was born in Rome on 20 April 1949, the son of , a partisan in the Italian resistance movement within the Patriotic Action Groups and communist politician, and Fabiola Modesti. He joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) at the age of 14 and began his political career in Pisa, where he was studying philosophy. He was praised as enfant prodige by the then PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti and took part in the protests of 1968, alongside his friend Fabio Mussi.
Career Italian Communist Youth Federation In 1975, D'Alema was elected national secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). It was during this period that D'Alema and Walter Veltroni met each other, and with him a dualism would form, without any public attacks. Years later, Veltroni recounted: "Massimo came from the party to more severely lead a rebel FGCI, I was more attentive to the movements." In 1983, he became regional secretary of the PCI's Apulian federation. The then PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer sent D'Alema in China to improve relations with the Chinese Communists after the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, and D'Alema followed Berlinguer in Moscow for the funeral of Yuri Andropov in 1984.
During the 1980s, the PCI's road to government did not succeed. To the press who reported a significant drop in membership, D'Alema replied that it was not only a problem of the PCI or of Italy but concerned all mass parties in the Western world, citing Christian Democracy (DC) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), the then main parties of government. He said: "I would like to know how many members the DC and the PSI have ... who escape this discussion not because they too do not have problems of this type, but simply because they are not transparent. And yet we are." According to D'Alema, the other parties registered through the distribution of card packages, while the PCI had a modern form of individual and voluntary registration. In the meantime, there was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the turning point of the Bolognina.
From 1988 to 1990, D'Alema was the director of L'Unità, formerly the official newspaper of the PCI, which subsequently became the newspaper of the DS. A journalist by profession, he also wrote for Città futura and Rinascita. It is recounted that D'Alema hated other journalists and that this was reciprocal, due to his word of scorn and haughtiness, allegations that he always denied. One notable case was a 1995 interview with Lucia Annunziata, which was sensational for its lucidity regarding the relationship between the powers that be and Italian media information. He explained how the press had lost its historical references, namely a solid political system, which guaranteed clarity of alignment, and how what he described as the new anarchy that emerged bore the sign of the "unqualified destructuring of the political democracy". He was asked "Do the 'powers that be' play the shambles of politics?", to which he replied: "There is no doubt. Information has been a formidable tool that has contributed to the disintegration and loss of authority of political power. No political power can survive information that spies on him through the keyhole as he goes to the toilet." Despite his criticism of the mass media, D'Alema came to accept the change of times and accepted invitations to Porta a Porta and was a host of Gianni Morandi's show, where he sang "C'era un ragazzo che come me amava i Beatles e i Rolling Stones". He and Morandi had met at the association football charity match between politicians and journalists.
From the Italian Communist Party to the Democrats of the Left D'Alema entered the PCI's national secretariat in 1986 and supported the transformation into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), which was launched by Achille Occhetto and made official by the Rimini party congress in February 1991. He was a notable member of the PCI, the bulk of which in 1991 became the PDS and in 1998 formed the Democrats of the Left (DS). It was during this period in the late 1980s and early 1990s that D'Alema found his first political enemies, who gave vitriolic interviews, such as the reformist , who criticized D'Alema and Occhetto for their lack of vision upon reaching the highest party positions. In the past, the selection went through hunger, debates in assembly, and the police of Scelba when communists were persecuted. In the post-war years, a qualified young communist flowed into the PCI for whom the communist militia coincided with a lifestyle choice. D'Alema embodied an anthropological turning point, where the Leninist concept of professional revolutionaries was rejected in favour of salaried party executives comparable to public administrators and union officials.
1994 saw the PCI tradition of the sole candidate for the party secretariat, the leader designated from above, broken. After Occhetto's resignation, D'Alema announced his candidacy to succeed him. When he learned that Veltroni would also do so, he entered Claudio Petruccioli's studio and told him: "I will certainly be elected, but have you thought what would happen if Veltroni were elected? With my opposition, it wouldn't last two months." As the PDS secretary, D'Alema attempted to normalize relations with Silvio Berlusconi, who later broke it, for institutional reforms. Following the loss of the PDS and Occhetto-led Alliance of Progressives in the 1994 Italian general election, D'Alema supported the creation of The Olive Tree coalition that opened up to centrist and moderate forces, whether secular or Catholic. In the internal life of the party, mostly during its transition from PCI to PDS, he stressed that its roots in Marxism should be renovated, with the aim to create a modern Western European social-democratic party. He was a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies since 1987 and president of the PDS parliamentary group from 1992 to 1994. In July 1994, he became its national secretary and surpassed Veltroni, his direct competitor, in the votes of the national council. Under his leadership, the PDS conducted a tough opposition against the first Berlusconi government (May 1994 – January 1995), and then became part of the majority government that supported the subsequent Dini government (January 1995 – May 1996), including the Italian People's Party and the Northern League, among others.
The same year of the DS foundation, succeeding Romano Prodi, D'Alema became Prime Minister of Italy as the leader of The Olive Tree coalition founded by Prodi and supported by D'Alema that, also thanks to the support of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), which was founded by those who were opposed to the dissolution of the PCI, had won the 1996 Italian general election; it was the first general election win for progressives. The first prime minister born after Italy became a republic in 1946, he was the first former Communist party member to become prime minister of a NATO country; he remains the only former PCI member to become prime minister. Committed to institutional reforms during the first Prodi government, he was first elected president of a bicameral commission for constitutional reforms in February 1997 and began the development of the PDS into a new unitary force that would aggregate further personalities and organizations from the socialist, secular, and left-wing Catholic area. In February 1998, the start of the formation process of the DS, which was led by D'Alema, was concluded with the merge of the PDS, the Labour Federation, the Movement of Unitarian Communists, the Social Christians, and exponents of the republican left. D'Alema became prime minister when the PRC retired its support of Prodi's government, and led to a new centre-left government, including the Democratic Union for the Republic and the Party of Italian Communists, the latter being a split from the PRC in disagreement over the fall of Prodi's government.
Centre-left coalition governments Prime Minister of Italy D'Alema became prime minister thanks to Francesco Cossiga and part of the right-wing opposition, after the crisis of the first Prodi government. A month after becoming prime minister, D'Alema left the secretariat of the DS to Veltroni and assumed the presidency of the party. The first D'Alema government continued on the path of financial recovery and privatization, as well as the reform of the welfare state. The differences within the majority were accentuated with the formation of the new grouping of The Democrats, which were linked to Prodi and Antonio Di Pietro and that often made the government's path bumpy, and also forced to deal with a difficult situation on the international level, as Italy took part in the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999.
D'Alema supported Italy's commitment in the NATO air intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in favour of Kosovo (March–June 1999). The intervention was also supported by Silvio Berlusconi and the right-wing opposition, while some of those further to the left, such as the PRC, strongly contested it. The government suffered setbacks at the 1999 European Parliament election in Italy, which was held in June, and new tensions in the majority led in December 1999 to his government’s resignation and the establishment of the second D'Alema government, in which greater weight was given to The Democrats.