Aldo Tortorella | |
---|---|
Member of the Chamber of Deputies | |
In office 25 May 1972 –14 April 1994 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Naples, Italy | 10 July 1926
Political party | PCI (till 1991) PDS (1991–1998) DS (1998–2007) |
Occupation | Journalist, politician |
Aldo Tortorella (born 10 July 1926) is an Italian journalist, former politician and partisan. He was a historical member of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI).
Tortorella was born in Naples, but spent his youth in Genoa and Milan. When he was a university student, he became a member of the Milanese resistance movement against fascism. He was imprisoned, but he was later able to escape to Genoa. After the liberation of Northern Italy, Tortorella became journalist (and eventually vice-director) for the Genoese edition of PCI's newspaper, L'Unità . In 1958-1962 he was vice-director of the Milanese edition and director of the national edition from 1970 to 1975.
Tortorella was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for the first time in 1972, a position he held until 1994. A follower of national secretary Enrico Berlinguer, he was the party's responsible for culture. In the late 1970s he was against Berlinguer's move towards the so-called Historic Compromise (Compromesso storico), which aimed to a government alliance between PCI and the other Italian main party of the period, Democrazia Cristiana .
In 1989 Tortorella was one of the main opponents of the Svolta della Bolognina, the change of PCI's name supported by new secretary Achille Occhetto [1] . However, when PCI became the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS), he remained in the party as member of the left-current led by Giovanni Berlinguer. In 1999, at the outbreak of the Kosovo War, Tortorella abandoned PDS in polemics with the then-prime minister and party leader, Massimo D'Alema, who had Italy take an active part in the conflict.
Tortorella in the following year dedicated to his leftist magazine, Critica marxista , and organized cultural activities dealing with Enrico Berlinguer's figure and politics.
Enrico Berlinguer was an Italian politician. Considered the most popular leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he led the PCI as the national secretary from 1972 until his death during a tense period in Italy's history, which was marked by the Years of Lead and social conflicts, such as the Hot Autumn of 1969–1970. Berlinguer was born into a middle-class family; his father was a socialist who became a deputy and later senator. After leading the party's youth wing in his hometown, he led the PCI's youth wing, the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI), at the national level from 1949 to 1956. In 1968, he was elected to the country's Chamber of Deputies, and he became the leader of the PCI in 1972; he remained a deputy until his death in 1984. Under his leadership, the number of votes for the PCI peaked. The PCI's results in 1976 remain the highest for any Italian left-wing or centre-left party both in terms of votes and vote share, and the party's results in 1984, just after his death, remain the best result for an Italian left-wing party in European elections, and were toppled, in terms of vote share in a lower-turnout election, in the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy.
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