AFP/Reuters/DPA/Rome

Sergio Mattarella, a constitutional court judge from Sicily who is seen as a symbol of Italy’s battle against organised crime, was elected Italy’s new president yesterday.
The 73-year-old Sicilian, who was backed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s centre-left Democratic Party (PD), succeeds the hugely popular Giorgio Napolitano, who is stepping down because of his advanced age.
Mattarella is little known to the public but is widely respected in politics after a 25-year parliamentary career and several stints as minister in governments of the left and right.
Renowned for his integrity, he entered politics after his elder brother was murdered by the Sicilian Mafia.
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.
Ferdinando Imposimato, the candidate of the anti-establishment 5-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 for a win in the three opening stages.
Three previous ballots, held on Thursday and Friday, were inconclusive because the ruling Democratic Party judged that there was not enough support to garner the then-required two-thirds majority, so it told its deputies to cast blank ballots.
In the end, Mattarella fell short of the two-third threshold by just eight votes. As the ruling party’s candidate Mattarella had support from most of the 415 PD politicians in the electoral college as well as several allied lawmakers.
But Italian presidential elections are nothing if not unpredictable, meaning the vote was not devoid of suspense.
In 2013, Romano Prodi was the favourite to succeed Napolitano, but a revolt within the PD scuppered his chances and blocked a decision, forcing Napolitano to agree to start a second mandate which he always insisted he would not finish.
Now 89, Napolitano announced earlier this month that he was too tired to carry on in what is a largely ceremonial role but can become politically significant during times of crisis over the formation of new governments.
Renzi’s backing for Mattarella has been interpreted as the end of a temporary alliance the premier forged with disgraced former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to help drive labour market and electoral reforms through parliament.
Mattarella is seen as an “anti-Berlusconi” figure, having severed his ties with the centre right in Italian politics 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 on Friday to be feeling “betrayed” by Renzi.
Mattarella, speaking at his office in the Constitutional Court after the vote, said: “My first thoughts are of the difficulties and hopes of our citizens.”
The election shows the 40-year-old Renzi in firm control of both his famously fractious party and his allies in the ruling majority as he seeks to pass reforms aimed at underpinning an economic recovery in Italy, where unemployment is soaring after six years of on-off recession.
As the ballots were counted out loud in the Chamber of Deputies, the 1,009 parliamentarians and regional officials eligible to vote burst into applause when Mattarella’s name surpassed the 505-vote threshold, making him Italy’s 12th president since World War II.
Mattarella is expected to be sworn in next week for a seven-year term, taking over officially from Napolitano.
“Keep up the good work, President Mattarella. Long live Italy!” Renzi tweeted after the vote. Even Pope Francis sent a congratulatory telegram.
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party appeared in disarray after the vote.
Berlusconi ordered his party to cast blank ballots after accusing Renzi of betraying what he said was a promise to give him a role in choosing the candidate.
Instead, more than 30 party members refused, opening a wound in the party.
A popular theory is that the Forza Italia leader was hoping for a sympathetic figure to be installed as president to increase his chances of winning a pardon over his criminal conviction which would allow him to return to parliament.
Renato Brunetta, Forza Italia’s chief whip in the lower house, said that the pact that Renzi and Berlusconi sealed last year to make institutional reforms was dead, but not all his party colleagues were so resolute and Berlusconi himself has yet to comment.
“Renzi made a unilateral decision to break the pact,” Brunetta said. “Nothing will be the same now.”
Mattarella is the first native of Sicily to become president. He has a reputation for being a reserved but straight-talking former minister, whose career in politics began after his brother, Piersanti, was shot dead by the Sicilian Mafia in 1980.
Mattarella’s political roots are in Italy’s defunct Christian Democrat party that his father Bernardo, an anti-fascist, helped to found after the war.
Though Mattarella is not seen as having vast international experience, he did serve as defence minister in two different centre-left governments, from 1999 to 2001.
In 1990, Mattarella resigned as education minister to protest a decree that favoured Berlusconi’s media empire, and three years later he drafted a voting law, which has since been changed, that was used when Berlusconi won his first of three national elections in 1994.