Alcide De Gasperi

Alcide Amedeo Francesco De Gasperi (Italian: [alˈtʃiːde de ˈɡasperi]; 3 April 1881 – 19 August 1954) was an Italian politician and statesman who founded the Christian Democracy party and served as prime minister of Italy in eight successive coalition governments from 1945 to 1953.

De Gasperi was the last prime minister of the Kingdom of Italy, serving under both Victor Emmanuel III and Umberto II. He was also the first prime minister of the Italian Republic, and also briefly served as provisional head of state after the Italian people voted to end the monarchy and establish a republic. His eight-year term in office remains a landmark of political longevity for a leader in modern Italian politics. De Gasperi is the fifth longest-serving prime minister since the Risorgimento.

A devout Catholic, he was one of the founding fathers of the European Union along with fellow Italian Altiero Spinelli.

De Gasperi was born in 1881 in Pieve Tesino in Tyrol, now part of the Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige, which at that time belonged to Austria-Hungary. His father was a local police officer of limited financial means. From 1896, De Gasperi was active in the Social Christian movement. In 1900 he joined the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Vienna, where he played an important role in the inception of the Christian student movement. He was very much inspired by the Rerum novarum encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. In 1904, he took an active part in student demonstrations in favour of an Italian-language university. During the inauguration of the Italian Faculty of Law in Innsbruck, he was imprisoned with a number of other protesting students, but was released after twenty days. In 1905, De Gasperi obtained a degree in philology.

In 1905, he began to work as editor of the newspaper La Voce Cattolica (The Catholic Voice) which was replaced in September 1906 by Il Trentino and he soon became its editor. In his newspaper, he often took positions in favour of cultural autonomy for Trentino and in defence of Italian culture in Trentino, in contrast to the Germanisation planned by the German nationalists in Tyrol. At the time, in disagreement with other politicians like Cesare Battisti, he did not seek unification with Italy. From 1908 to 1912, he was vice-president and one of the three executive board members of the Banca Industriale di Trento, a local investment bank supported by the Catholic movement.

In 1911, he became a member of Parliament for the Popular Political Union of Trentino (UPPT) in the Austrian Reichsrat, a post he held for six years. At the beginning of World War I, he was politically neutral, sympathizing with the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Pope Benedict XV and Karl I of Austria to obtain an honourable peace and stop the war. Ultimately, he sided with Italy.

In 1919, he was among the founders of the Italian People's Party (PPI), with Luigi Sturzo. He served as a deputy in the Italian Parliament from 1921 to 1924, a period marked by the rise of Fascism. He initially supported the participation of the PPI in Benito Mussolini's first government in October 1922.

As Mussolini's hold on the Italian government grew stronger, he soon diverged with the Fascists over constitutional changes to the powers of the executive and to the election system (the Acerbo Law), and over Fascist violence against the constitutional parties, culminating in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. The PPI split, and De Gasperi became secretary of the remaining anti-Fascist group in May 1924. In November 1926, in a climate of overt violence and intimidation by the Fascists, the PPI was dissolved.