President of Italy

The president of Italy, officially titled President of the Italian Republic (Italian: Presidente della Repubblica Italiana), is the head of state of Italy. In that role, the president represents national unity and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the Constitution. The president is the commander-in-chief of the Italian Armed Forces and chairs the High Council of the Judiciary. The president serves a seven-year term, with no term limits. The incumbent president is former constitutional judge Sergio Mattarella, who was elected on 31 January 2015, and re-elected on 29 January 2022.

The framers of the Constitution of Italy intended for the president to be an elder statesman of some stature. Article 84 states that any Italian citizen who is fifty or older on election day and enjoys civil and political rights can be elected president. The article also states that the presidency is incompatible with any other office; therefore, the president-elect must resign any other position before being sworn in.

The 1948 Constitution sets the presidential term at seven years. It does not put any term limit on the presidency, although until 2013 no president ever ran for a second term. On 20 April 2013, President Giorgio Napolitano agreed to run for a second term in an attempt to break the parliamentary deadlock in the 2013 presidential elections and was duly reelected the same day. However, he made it clear that he would not serve his full term and resigned in January 2015.

The president of the Italian Republic is elected by an electoral college, consisting of the members of both chambers of the Italian Parliament, and 58 special electors appointed by the regions.

Prior to the 2020 Italian constitutional referendum, which reduced the number of elected parliament members, the electoral college was much larger, with 1,009 members participating in the 2022 election.

According to the Constitution, the election must be held by a secret ballot, with the senators, deputies and regional representatives all being required to vote. A two-thirds vote is required to elect on any of the first three rounds of balloting; after that, a simple majority suffices. The number of rounds has often been large thanks to the secret ballot and fragmented nature of the Italian Parliament. The election is presided over by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, who calls for the public counting of the votes. The vote is held in the Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, which is expanded and re-configured for the event.

There is no formal personal candidacy but only proposals from groups within the electoral college or from groups of citizens, so any citizen may be voted or elected, regardless of any expressed intention to be a candidate.

Members of the electoral college, mostly being part of political parties, can make public or undisclosed agreements between each other on a name to vote as a candidate, but the votes during the ballot remain secret as only the candidate's name is revealed but not the voter who wrote it so it's not always clear, especially to the public, if such agreements are there and if a party or a group of voters actually comply with them during a ballot.