Sergio Mattarella, an Italian Constitutional Court judge from Sicily who has come to symbolize the nation’s battle against organized crime, was on Saturday elected the nation’s president.
The 73-year-old Sicilian — backed by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party — succeeds the hugely popular former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, 89, who is stepping down due to old age.
Renzi’s support for Mattarella, who has crossed swords with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, helped both unify the ruling party and send a message to Berlusconi that the government no longer depended on his support to pass reforms.
“Good work, President Mattarella! Long live Italy!” Renzi tweeted.
Pope Francis and US President Barack Obama were among the other leaders to send congratulations.
Mattarella won 665 votes in the fourth round of voting by a 1,009-member electoral college, composed of members of the two houses of parliament — the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies — and 58 representatives of the regions.
Italian magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato, the candidate of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, won 127 votes. The threshold for victory at the fourth round was a simple majority, down from the two-thirds majority needed in the opening stages.
The president-elect is little known among the general public, but is a respected figure in political circles after a 25-year parliamentary career and several stints as minister in governments of the left and right.
He entered politics after his elder brother, who was president of the region of Sicily, was murdered by the mafia 1980. Renzi’s backing for Mattarella was interpreted as the end of the temporary alliance the prime minister had forged with his disgraced forerunner in order to drive labor market and electoral reforms through parliament.
Mattarella is seen as an “anti-Berlusconi” figure, having switched sides from the political right to the left in the 1990s, partly because of his distaste for the media tycoon, who still heads the opposition Forza Italia Party despite a tax fraud conviction.
Berlusconi was reported to be feeling “betrayed” by Renzi.
“The [Democratic Party] had to show it was the backbone of the system and it did,” Italian paper La Repubblica editor-in-chief Ezio Mauro said. “For Berlusconi, it is certainly a major blow.”
Mattarella is to be sworn in tomorrow.
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