Romano Prodi

}} Template:Audio (born 9 August 1939) is a center-left Italian politician. He was Prime Minister of Italy from 1996 to 1998 and President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004. It appears that he will be Prime Minister of Italy again, following the April 2006 elections: the voting results were near-tie between the l'Unione coalition led by Prodi and the Casa delle Libertà led by Silvio Berlusconi. On April 19, 2006 an Italian court upheld the election victory of l'Unione.

In 1969 he married Flavia Franzoni; they have two sons, Giorgio and Antonio. He and his family still live in Bologna.

Education

Romano Prodi was born in Scandiano, in the province of Reggio Emilia (Emilia-Romagna).

After completing his secondary education at the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto in Reggio Emilia, studied at the Catholic University of Milan, where he took a degree in law with distinction in 1961, presenting a dissertation on protectionism in the development of Italian industry to Prof. Siro Lombardini. Prodi went on to specialize at the universities of Milan and Bologna, and at the London School of Economics under Basil Yamey, Professor of Industrial Economics.

Prodi was also a Visiting Professor at Harvard University and was associated with Stanford Research Institute.

Academic career

His academic career began at the department of economics and at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bologna, where he worked as an assistant professor (1963), associate professor (1966) and lastly professor (1971-1999) of industrial organisation and industrial policy.

Politics

Prodi used to be a left-wing Christian Democrat. During the mid-1970s, he began to enter Italian politics, and was appointed Minister of Industry in 1978 during Giulio Andreotti's government; he held posts on various commissions through the 1980s and early 1990s. He served as chairman of the powerful state-owned industrial holding company IRI - from 1982 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1994. However he twice came under investigation for alleged corruption while he was head of IRI. He was accused of conflict of interest first in connection with contracts awarded to his own economic research company, and secondly over the sale of the loss making state owned food conglomerate SME to the multinational Unilever - for which he had for a time been a paid consultant; but, for both accusations, he obtained a full acquittal. In 1995 he became Chairman of the centre-left Ulivo coalition, and in 1996 Prime Minister. His government fell in 1998 when the Communist Refoundation Party withdrew support, allowing the formation of a new government under Massimo D'Alema. This happened by only one vote in the Chamber of Deputies (it required the support of the majority of the members of both the chambers), however the disappointment was not due to a formal withdrawal of support, rather to a contrary vote on a subject matter declared fundamental for the Government and that would have caused the resignation in case of a negative parliamentary outcome of the voting (questione di fiducia, as opposite to fiducia delle Camere that a Government needs for the initial appointment and that can be withdrawn under a specifically called agenda under a procedure that has never been used in the Italian parliamentary history).

Image:Bush Persson Prodi.jpg

From September 1999 until 18 November 2004, Prodi was the President of the European Commission.

See also

• Community Patent
• EU enlargement
• Euro launch
• European constitution
• Italian general elections, 2006
• Lisbon Agenda
• Prodi Commission

External links

• Personal political/campaign website
• Official Site of the President of the European Commission - Includes a curriculum vitae, from which some of the information in this article was drawn
• Clarifying the SME case

Template:Start box {{succession box | title = Prime Minister of Italy | before = Lamberto Dini | after = Massimo D'Alema | years = 1996–1998 }} {{succession box | title = President of the European Commission | before = Manuel Marín | after = José Manuel Durão Barroso | years = 1999–2004 }} {{incumbent succession box | title = Prime Minister of Italy
(has not yet been asked to form a government) | before = Silvio Berlusconi | start = 2006 }} Template:End box