Pier Ferdinando Casini


Pier Ferdinando Casini is an Italian politician. He was President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies from 2001 to 2006. Casini is currently Honorific President of the Centrist Democrat International and Honorary President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and formerly was majority faction leader of the Union of the Centre.

Biography

Casini was born in Bologna and graduated with a degree in law. He was first elected in 1983 for the Christian Democracy party. In 1993, he was amongst the founders of the Christian Democratic Centre, which merged into Union of Christian and Centre Democrats in 2002. In 2001, after Silvio Berlusconi's victory in the general election, Casini was chosen by the newly formed parliament as President of the Chamber of Deputies. Up to 2006, with his UDC, he was widely regarded as one of the primary members of the House of Freedoms, and sometimes spoken of as a possible successor to Berlusconi himself as leader of the coalition. However, as the campaign for the 2008 general election began, Casini officially detached himself from Berlusconi's coalition, refusing to enter his new People of Freedom party, preferring to contest the election alone. In a speech to his UDC party, Casini said that "not everyone is for sale", in a not so veiled statement about Berlusconi's political tactics. Casini ran on a purely 'centrist' platform, expanding the UDC into the Union of the Centre along with Savino Pezzotta's White Rose. After 2008, he remained in opposition. At the 2009 Administrative elections, alliances were decided on a local bases, sometimes with PdL, and sometimes with the Democratic Party.
In 2018 Casini was re-elected Senator in the single-member college of Bologna with the support of the centre-left coalition.

Honours and awards

First-past-the-post elections