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Carlo Azeglio
Ciampi, Former Italian Prime Minister, Dies at 95
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former prime minister and president of
Italy and a highly respected economist who, as treasury minister, helped usher
in the euro, died on Friday. He was 95.
Mr. Ciampi’s death, after a long
illness, was confirmed by the Italian Senate, where he served as senator for
life. He had been hospitalized in recent days in Rome after his condition
worsened, the news agency ANSA reported, citing his doctor. No other details
were provided.
As prime minister from April 1993
to May 1994, Mr. Ciampi led postwar Italy’s first technocratic government
during a sweeping corruption inquiry that reshaped the country’s political
landscape. He was president from 1999 to 2006, and governor of the Bank of
Italy for 14 years.
Mr. Ciampi never belonged to a
political party, and in 1993 he became the first prime minister who had not
been elected to Parliament. He was governor of the central bank when President
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro named him prime minister on an interim basis. Asked to
shepherd a nation rocked by corruption scandals, he was chosen because he was
considered above politics.
As prime minister, Mr. Ciampi
enforced a policy of tight state spending and deficit cuts after years of
freewheeling government spending. He resigned after 13 months, saying that he
considered the country to be on its way to recovery.
A firm believer in the euro, he
ensured, as treasury minister, that Italy passed the test to be among the
founding eurozone members in 1997 by reducing the deficit to 2.7 percent from
6.4 percent. He said it was important for Italy to be part of the new currency
from the beginning. Otherwise, he said, “the Mediterranean component, the real
cradle of European civilization, would have been marginalized.”
Mr. Ciampi was born on Dec. 9,
1920, to a bourgeois family in the Tuscan port city Livorno. He attended a
Jesuit school, joined the army in 1941 and graduated with a degree in
literature from the prestigious Normal University in Pisa before taking a second
degree in law
He became secretary general of
the Bank of Italy in 1973 and was appointed to the top post, central bank
governor, in 1979. He sought during his 14-year term to defend the central
bank’s independence.
He is survived by his wife,
Franca, and two children.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi
recalled Mr. Ciampi as “a man of the institutions who served Italy with
passion.” Pope Francis said Mr. Ciampi had “covered his public responsibilities
with masterly discretion and a strong sense of state.”
