Guido Crosetto (born 19 September 1963) is an Italian politician and businessman who is the Minister of Defence since 22 October 2022. Born in Cuneo, he grew up into a family involved in agriculture and construction, and later took over the family business. Crosetto began his political career in Christian Democracy (DC) and was mainly involved in the local politics of Piedmont. From 1990 to 2004, he was mayor of Marene. In 2000, he joined Forza Italia (FI). His rise in national politics began with his election to the Chamber of Deputies in 2001, a position he held until 2013 and from 2018 to 2019. In 2009, Crosetto joined The People of Freedom (PdL) and served as an undersecretary at the Ministry of Defence in the fourth Berlusconi government from 2008 to 2011. In 2012, Crosetto was among the founders (alongside Giorgia Meloni and Ignazio La Russa) of Brothers of Italy (FdI), of which he served as national coordinator from 2013 to 2014 and from 2018 to 2019, representing its moderate wing.
After leaving electoral politics in 2014, Crosetto returned to the Chamber of Deputies in 2018 and again served as national coordinator of FdI. He resigned from Italian Parliament in 2019 to focus on his business career, while remaining a close adviser to Meloni and an influential figure within the party. He was widely regarded as part of FdI's moderate wing and advocated its development into a broad conservative party rather than a narrowly right-wing movement. Crosetto was active in the Italian defence industry, serving as president of the Federation of Italian Companies for Aerospace, Defence and Security (AIAD), senior adviser to Leonardo, and chairman of Orizzonte Sistemi Navali. In 2022, he became Minister of Defence in the Meloni government. Before becoming defence minister, he resigned from his private-sector positions and divested himself of his business interests to address potential conflicts of interest.
Crosetto identifies as an anti-fascist, despite being a co-founder of FdI, and has condemned fascist symbolism and commemorations within the political right. He has also advocated a more moderate and Christian-democratic approach to conservatism and greater European integration. In foreign policy, he has argued that Europe must strengthen its political, economic, and military capabilities to reduce its dependence on the United States, while maintaining support for Atlanticism. He has described the growing strategic competition between the United States and China as a defining feature of international politics, and has criticised Italy's participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, while calling for a pragmatic approach to relations with major powers.
As Minister of Defence, Crosetto has been a prominent supporter of Ukraine and of increased European defence cooperation, while advocating the modernisation of the Italian Armed Forces and higher defence spending. He has also taken independent positions on international affairs, supporting a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict while becoming increasingly critical of Israel's conduct in Gaza. In 2026, following the outbreak of war involving Iran, he criticised the United States and Israeli military intervention and warned of the risk of wider escalation, while supporting the deployment of Italian air-defence capabilities to Gulf states. He has argued for a stronger and more integrated European defence policy and for greater European strategic autonomy, while maintaining Italy's commitments to NATO and its existing alliances.
Early life Family and business Crosetto was born into a family of agricultural entrepreneurs in Cuneo, the capital city of the province of Cuneo in the Italian region of Piedmont, on 19 September 1963. In addition to Cuneo, he grew up in Alba, calling himself "a children of the province of Granda", and Marene. At a young age, Crosetto took over the family business, which produced agricultural machinery, later expanding his business to other sectors, including real estate and tourism. The business was known as Agrimec, before it was renamed to Crosetto as a private limited company, and produced agricultural trailers since 1937, before its expansion to other sectors. Both Crosetto's father and grandfather were entrepreneurs who built agricultural machineries, leading to an agro-mechanical dynasty that Crosetto dates back to the 1870s. One of his father's maxim was "The same one the family began with, a century earlier: 'The more expensive, the better, adding that for his family, "machines weren't tools but works of art". His mother's maxim was "The only thing that matters is loving each other. Everything else will sort itself out".
Of his childhood, Crosetto said: "Anyone who knows the Po Valley knows that raising pigs and cows fills the air with the smell of manure. When I told my father, 'It stinks,' he replied, 'Shut up, because this smell will feed you.' We produced agricultural machinery, including manure spreaders, so it was doubly true for us." He grew up "playing and jumping in the sheds among our jewels", such as trailers, manure spreader wagons, and even the manure spreader, without which he said "one wouldn't eat fruit and vegetables, you know". His Proustian moment was "the smell of iron", which Crosetto said it made him "feel at home." During his teens, Crosetto went to the workshop, wearing the mandatory blue overalls as a blue-collar worker; he explained that he suffers from premature baldness and that his hair was already receding at twenty. In 2022, he recalled: "Like all the sons in the family, before the law prohibited it, from the age of 15 I was sent to the workshop every summer for a month to work." He expressed pride in this, saying that he can "immodestly give anyone points for iron cutting and welding" and added: "I can weld with electrodes, with continuous wire, or even with a blowtorch. With a blowtorch—you know it's a very difficult job—I'd put on my visor and give it my all." He had no weekly or monthly allowance, and said that he borrowed money from his father and paid it back in a month by playing on the stock market, saying that to find, buy, and sell companies is what he has done all his life.
While his mother was a Christian democrat, his father was liberal who—according to Crosetto—despised the DC almost more than the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and said the DC was the symbol of "statism and inefficiency". In the office of Crosetto's father, who instead of studying law as he would have liked, began working in the family business at 15, there hung a quote from the liberal Luigi Einaudi. He described him as "a good father with little time" and said that he lost him "too soon". When this occurred, Crosetto was in his early 20s and he later described himself during this time as "an idiot, like all the boys that age, who only thought about partying and having fun". During the 1970s, Crosetto recalled that he mourned Olivia Newton-Jones "like someone burying a legend from her youth" and that he enjoyed dancing in what was the dawn of disco music, and was more at the disco than at the political section of a party. Of this era, he cited the first strobe lights, the 1977 dance drama Saturday Night Fever and the 1978 musical romantic comedy film Grease, and the Bee Gees. He often took his father's car, a beige Citroën DS, eventually leading his father to buy him an Audi.
Father's death and aftermath In 2022, Crosetto described the day his father "brutal and unexpected diagnosis" of a tumor with zero hope of survival as "a punch in the face, cold". His father would die 12 months later, exactly as the doctors had predicted. This caused him to become the de facto head of the family when he "wasn't a man yet: I had to become one, accompanying my father through an endless and painful year of agony." Of the day after the funeral, he recalled: "My mother—an extraordinary woman—had never worked in a company. I thought, in an imaginary dialogue with him: 'You were the one who held everything together. Now what do I do? Crosetto said that he "struggled a lot", as he also had to change jobs, but in the end "managed to get back on [his] feet, and that was survival", before adding: "The suffering of such a terrible loss stays with you for a lifetime."
Of his father's death, which occurred following a botched operation, Crosetto recalled in 2025 "the hellish diagnosis" contained in the medical report, stating: "One day I came home and found my mother waiting for me in the entrance hall. A kiss, a hug, then she dragged me into the living room. On the table were some chest X-rays and a medical report. 'What do you think it means?' she asked me. From there, a sort of desperate race began, made of the desperation that goes beyond the limits of rationality and typical of those who seek hope even in places they wouldn't normally go. There's a Turk who claims to have a miracle machine? Take your father and go to the Turk. You hear that there's someone who can heal anything with his hands? Take your father and drag him there." He also described his father's surgery and the aftermath thusly: "They operated on him, twelve hours of surgery, and afterward he seemed almost on the verge of recovery. Then complications arose. A nurse, moved by compassion, confessed to me almost in tears that in their haste to open and close it, they had forgotten some gauze inside, which had caused an infection." He recalled his father's last moments, stating that he "closed himself in the most impenetrable silence" and "never asked anything", concluding: "When it happened, I was there beside him: a breath, another breath, another breath, then silence, silence, silence. I touched him, I looked at him, I started crying and screaming 'Mom, Mom!' Like a child."
In an interview with Gianni Pittella and his wife, Agata Pittella, Crosetto recalled of his early life and family business, stating: "I feel gratified by what life has given me, even though I must say I had to earn it tooth and nail, starting at a young age after my father's death, having to climb ever higher mountains alone. However, I did it without even realising the difficulty of what I was doing, and I did it because I always thought I was following a path that wouldn't just benefit me, but could also improve everything around me: be it a municipality, a province, a region, or a nation." He added: "I don't feel capable of teaching anything or imparting messages; I can only tell you how I lived my life. Life. I lived it without fear: without fear of working, without fear of sacrificing myself, without fear of taking risks, without fear of showing my weaknesses and without fear of even sometimes showing my incompetence." In 2025, Crosetto recalled that he did not immediately take his father's place in the family agricultural machinery business, stating: "My uncle paid us off. The Civil Code allowed him to, and he did. We were forced to start from scratch. We had enough to eat, of course. But it was very difficult." Earlier in 2022, he said that one of his best investments was when he found a truck driver who had the idea of making livestock products from expired croissants, describing it as "one of the smartest and most profitable ideas of my life". On the other hand, one of his worst investments Nava, failed helmet company that he wanted to revive it by taking over the brand. Describing it as "the biggest mistake of my life", he hired a manager and lost a few million euros, and he ultimately closed it down.
Education