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(born 9 August 1939) is an Italian politician. Since May 17, 2006, he has served as President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) of Italy following the victory of his ''The Union'' coalition over the ''House of Freedoms'' (Casa delle Libertà) led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections.
Prodi previously ran in 1996 as Olive Tree candidate, winning the election and serving as Prime Minister until 1998. He then served as President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.

Contents

Personal

Academic career

Politics

Beginnings

Olive Tree and first cabinet (1995-1998)

President of the European Commission (1999–2004)

Prodi's return to Italian politics and his second government

2007 crisis, resignation and reappointment

See also

Notes

External links

Personal

Prodi was born in Scandiano, in the province of Reggio Emilia (Emilia-Romagna). He is the eighth of nine children of Mario Prodi, an engineer originally from a peasant family, and Enrica, an elementary school teacher. He has six brothers, five of them university professors (one of whom Vittorio Prodi is also a Member of the European Parliament, and two sisters.
Prodi, a devout Roman Catholic, married Flavia Franzoni in 1969. He was married by then-priest Camillo Ruini, now a well-known cardinal.^[1][2] They have two sons, Giorgio and Antonio. He and his family still live in Bologna.

Academic career

After completing his secondary education at the ''Liceo Ludovico Ariosto'' in Reggio Emilia, Prodi graduated in law at the Sacro Cuore Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan in 1961, with a thesis on the role of Protectionism in the development of Italian industry. He then carried out postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics.^[3]
In 1963, he became a teaching assistant for Beniamino Andreatta in the Department of Economics and the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bologna, subsequently serving as associate professor (1966) and finally (1971-1999) as Professor of Industrial Organisation and Industrial Policy. Prodi has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University and a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute. His research covers mainly competition regulations and the development of small and medium businesses. He is also interested in relations between states and markets, and the dynamics of the different capitalistic models.
Prodi has received almost 20 honorary degrees from institutions in Italy, the rest of Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.

Politics

Beginnings

Prodi's political career began as a left-of-centre reformist Christian Democrat and a disciple of Beniamino Andreatta, another economist turned politician. During the mid-1970s he was appointed Minister of Industry. During Giulio Andreotti's government in 1978 he served as a ''Technical Minister''; through the 1980s and early 1990s he continuously served various government committees.
On April 2, 1978, Prodi and other teachers at the University of Bologna passed on a tip-off that revealed the whereabouts of the safe house where the kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former Prime Minister, was being held captive by the Brigate Rosse Red Brigades. Prodi claimed he had been given this tip-off by the founders of the Christian Democratic Party, contacted from beyond the grave via a séance and a Ouija board. Whilst during this supposed séance Prodi thought the word Gradoli referred to a town on the outskirts of Rome, it probably referred to the Roman address of a Red Brigades safe house, located at no. 96, Via Gradoli. Later, other Italian members of the European Commission claimed Prodi had invented this story to conceal the real source of the tip-off, which they believed to have originated somewhere among the far-left Italian political groups.^[4]
From 1982-1989 and 1993-1994 Prodi, an expert economist and negotiator, was CEO of the powerful state-owned industrial holding company IRI. In this position he twice came under investigation, firstly for an alleged conflict of interest in relation to contracts awarded to his own economic research company, and secondly concerning the sale of the loss-making state-owned food conglomerate SME to the multinational Unilever, for which he had, for a time, been a paid consultant. He was fully acquitted on both counts.

Olive Tree and first cabinet (1995-1998)

In 1995 Prodi became Leader of the centre-left Olive Tree coalition, and in the 1996