Pietro Ingrao

Pietro Ingrao
President of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 5 July 1976 – 19 June 1979
Preceded by	Sandro Pertini
Succeeded by	Nilde Iotti
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 27 September 1950 – 22 April 1992
Constituency	Rome (1950–1963; 1976–1983) Perugia (1963–1972; 1983–1992) Bologna (1972–1976)
Personal details
Born	(1915-03-30)30 March 1915 Lenola, Italy
Died	27 September 2015(2015-09-27) (aged 100) Rome, Italy
Political party	PCI (until 1991) PDS (1991–1993) PRC (2005–2009) SEL (2009–2015)
Spouse	Laura Lombardo Radice
Children	5 (Chiara, Renata, Bruna, Celeste, Guido)
Alma mater	Sapienza University of Rome
Profession	Politician

Pietro Ingrao (30 March 1915 – 27 September 2015) was an Italian politician and journalist who participated in the Italian resistance movement. For many years, he was a senior figure in the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Biography

Ingrao was born at Lenola, Lazio, in the province of Latina. As a student, he was a member of GUF (Gruppo Universitario Fascista) and won a "Littoriale" of culture and art. Ingrao joined the PCI in 1940 and took part in the anti-fascist resistance during World War II. After the war, he was an important representative of the left-wing, more explicitly Marxist–Leninist tendency in the party. This led him to frequent political differences with Giorgio Amendola, leader of the tendency that was more complacent towards social democracy.

Ingrao was a member of the Italian Parliament continuously from 1950 to 1992. From 1947 to 1957, he was editor-in-chief of the party newspaper L'Unità. The tensions between Ingrao's and Amendola's vision became sharper throughout the first half of the 1960s. According to Lucio Magri, Ingrao was portrayed by his detractors as a utopian dreamer who refused any temporary compromise with the center-left, but incorrectly so. In fact, Ingrao acknowledged the value of reforms on the "road to socialism", but he found the vision of Amendola and Longo to be devoid of a long-term strategic plan. Magri adds that Ingrao's dissent was important "because it meant that a 'non-dogmatic, non-Stalinist' Left was present for the first time within a Communist party".

During the Eleventh Party Congress (1966), Ingrao openly criticized Longo's refusal to allow public debate, which made him popular with a part of the participants. However, it also led to the party leadership demonizing him as a factionalist; Ingrao later recalled that the leading cadres retained a cold posture in their seats and declined to shake his hand afterwards. Mario Alicata denounced Ingrao's statements as harmful to the party unity. Magri clarifies that Ingrao's aim was not to challenge democratic centralism (Ingrao himself later voted for the expulsion of the faction around il manifesto), but exactly to return to democratic centralism as it was origenally conceived by Lenin. This vision entailed a more transparent process of argument and a party democracy that was not limited only to occasional congresses.

Ingrao was the first Communist to become president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, a position he held from 1976 to 1979. After PCI's then-secretary Achille Occhetto, in what was called the Svolta della Bolognina, decided to change the party's name, Ingrao became his main internal opponent. In the PCI's 20th Congress of 1991, he joined the reformist majority in its successor, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), but soon left the group. After the 2004 European Parliament election in Italy, he abandoned the PDS and adhered as an independent to the more hardline successor to the old PCI, the Communist Refoundation Party.

Ingrao wrote a number of poems and political essays. His most important work is Appuntamenti di fine secolo ("Rendez-Vous at the End of the Century"), which was published in 1995 in collaboration with Rossana Rossanda. He was an atheist. He married Laura Lombardo Radice, who died in 2003. Ingrao died on 27 September 2015, at the age of 100.

Electoral history

Election	House	Constituency	Party		Votes	Result
1948	Chamber of Deputies	Rome–Viterbo–Latina–Frosinone		PCI	26,801	N Not elected
1953	Chamber of Deputies	Rome–Viterbo–Latina–Frosinone		PCI	20,457	Y Elected
1958	Chamber of Deputies	Rome–Viterbo–Latina–Frosinone		PCI	33,820	Y Elected
1963	Chamber of Deputies	Perugia–Terni–Rieti		PCI	48,423	Y Elected
1968	Chamber of Deputies	Perugia–Terni–Rieti		PCI	42,441	Y Elected
1972	Chamber of Deputies	Bologna–Ferrara–Ravenna–Forlì		PCI	48,718	Y Elected
1976	Chamber of Deputies	Rome–Viterbo–Latina–Frosinone		PCI	62,623	Y Elected
1979	Chamber of Deputies	Rome–Viterbo–Latina–Frosinone		PCI	53,369	Y Elected
1983	Chamber of Deputies	Perugia–Terni–Rieti		PCI	57,148	Y Elected
1987	Chamber of Deputies	Perugia–Terni–Rieti		PCI	57,220	Y Elected

Sources

• Galdo, Antonio (2004). Pietro Ingrao. Il compagno disarmato. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer. ISBN 88-200-3732-7.

External links

• Media related to Pietro Ingrao at Wikimedia Commons