He died this morning at 7, in the Villa dei Pini nursing home in Avellino, where he had been hospitalized since April, after a ischemic attack. Ciriaco De Mita, former prime minister and secretary of the DC, was 94 years old. After rupture of the femur, in Februarydue to a fall at home, he was following a rehabilitation process, but in recent days his conditions have worsened.
De Mita was born in Nusco, in the province of Avellino, in 1928. He was the son of a tailor. Graduated in Law at the University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, he worked at Enrico Mattei’s Eni. He entered the DC in 1953, was elected deputy in 1963 (for the first time) and remained there for thirty years. It was Prime Minister from 1988 to 1989, secretary and then president of the Christian Democrats from 1982 to 1989, minister and parliamentarian four times. Since 2014 he was the mayor of Nusco, the municipality where he was born.
He was already 88 when, in a confrontation on TV with Matteo Renzi, he said to the then prime minister: “I was born and will die DC while you do not know what you are ».
For the secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta, De Mita was «a fan of politics. A great leader who has never held back in making difficult choices“. Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, proposes «A prayer for Ciriaco De Mita: beyond the different opinions, his passion for politics and attention to the community deserve respect. Condolences to his family ». “A great protagonist of Italian politics” also according to the national coordinator of Forza Italia, Antonio Tajani. “Often I have not shared his choices and his ideas, but I have shared years with him in the European Parliament in the EPP group, where we had built a good human relationship. A prayer”.
For Clemente Mastella, mayor of Benevento and exponent of the Christian Democrats, De Mita “represented a part of personal history and Italian history and the pride, the culture of peasant civilization, to arrive at the management of power in our country not with a form of arrogance, but in the tentative to change things according to that trait of humanity typical of our people. In part he was misunderstood“.
Source: Vanity Fair
