page_title: Sergio Mattarella
section_title: 1990s
hierarchical_section_title: Sergio Mattarella / Political career / 1990s
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Fotografia ufficiale dell'On. Sergio Mattarella (anno 1994) Licensing Categoria:Deputati della XII legislatura della Repubblica Italiana Categoria:Politici del Partito Popolare Italiano
context_page_description: Sergio Mattarella OMRI OMCA K.U.O.M. GColL RSerafO KBE is an Italian politician, jurist, academic and lawyer, who is serving as the 12th and current President of Italy since February 2015.
  Mattarella was previously Minister for Parliamentary Relations from 1987 to 1989, Minister of Public Education from 1989 to 1990, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy from 1998 to 1999 and Minister of Defence from 1999 to 2001. In 2011, he became an elected judge on the Constitutional Court. On 31 January 2015, he was elected by the Italian Parliament to serve as President of the Italian Republic.
context_section_description: In 1990 Mattarella was appointed Vice-Secretary of Christian Democracy. He left the post two years later to become director of Il Popolo, the official newspaper of the party. Following the Italian referendum of 1993 he drafted the new electoral law nicknamed Mattarellum. In 1994, when Christian Democracy was dissolved in the wake of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal, he helped found the Italian People's Party (PPI), along with its first leader Mino Martinazzoli and other former Christian Democrats. In the ensuing 1994 general election (in which the newly founded PPI fared poorly) Martinazzoli was again elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He soon found himself engaged in an internal dispute after the election of a new party leader, Rocco Buttiglione, who wished to steer the Italian People's Party towards an electoral alliance with Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Following Buttiglione's appointment, Mattarella resigned as director of Il Popolo in opposition to this policy.
  Mattarella was one of the first supporters of the economist Romano Prodi at the head of the centre-left coalition known as The Olive Tree (L'Ulivo) in the 1996 general election. After the electoral victory of the centre-left, Mattarella served as President of the PPI's parliamentary group. Two years later, when Prodi's first government fell, Mattarella was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence in the government of Massimo D'Alema, then-leader of the Democrats of the Left (DS). As Minister of Defence he supported the NATO Intervention in Yugoslavia against the Serbian President Slobodan Milošević; he also approved a reform of the Italian Armed Forces which abolished conscription. After the resignation of D'Alema in 2000, Mattarella kept his position as Minister of Defence in the government of Giuliano Amato.
caption: Sergio Mattarella in 1994
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