Gianni Pittella

Early life and family

Pittella was born on 19 November 1958 in Lauria, a small town of the Southern Italian region Basilicata. He graduated in medicine and surgery, and later specialized in legal and forensic medicine at the University of Naples Federico II. He is the son of Domenico Pittella, who was a member of the Senate of the Republic from 1972 to 1983 in the Basilicata constituency. His younger brother, Marcello Pittella, is also a politician, who was the president of Basilicata from 2013 to 2019. Referred to as the Pittellas, they are considered a dynasty within the Italian region of Basilicata.

Career

Local and national political career

Following the political career of his father and his brother, Pittella was a member of the Italian Socialist Party, the Labour Federation, and the Democrats of the Left. At the age of 21, he was elected to the municipal council of his hometown Lauria and a year later became a member of the Regional Council of Basilicata with responsibility for training, culture and productive activities. After his graduation, Pittella remained very much involved in local and national politics. He was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and regional secretary of Young Socialists in Basilicata. With the Italian Socialist Party, he became Lauria's municipal councillor in 1979 and member of Basilicata's regional council in 1980, the youngest regional councilor in Italy. In the 1994 Italian general election, Pittella record the highest percentage of vote for the Italian Socialist Party. In the subsequent 1994 European Parliament election in Italy, he recorded the highest number of preferential vote (about 30,000) among those who were not elected. In the 1996 Italian general election, he was elected to the Italian Parliament as a member of the Labour Federation. In 2013, Pittella was a member of the national leadership council of the Democratic Party, then led by Pier Luigi Bersani. He took part in the 2013 Democratic Party leadership election. He came fourth out of four with 5.7% in the vote by party members, thus being excluded to the subsequent primary election.

Member of the European Parliament

In the 1999 European Parliament election in Italy, Pittella was elected to the European Parliament with 64,499 preferential votes and became a member of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. He was re-elected with 138,876 preferential votes in the 2004 European Parliament election in Italy. He obtained a similar result in the 2009 European Parliament election in Italy. Pittella's most successful re-election was in the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy, where the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats became the largest group from Italy as he added over 100,000 votes to his 2009 result; this placed him ahead of party-colleague Pina Picierno, the candidate hand-picked by the then Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi to lead the Democratic Party list in the European Parliament's Southern Italy constituency.

In the European Parliament, Pittella first served on the Committee on Budgets between 1999 and 2009. In this capacity, he was the European Parliament's rapporteur on the 2006 budget, the last under a seven-year expenditure framework. He later was a member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (2009–2012) and the Committee on Culture and Education (2012–2014). Within his parliamentary group, he led the Italian delegation within the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and also served as the group's First Vice-chairman between 1999 and 2014 under the leadership of successive chairmen Enrique Barón Crespo (1999–2004), Martin Schulz (2004–2012), and Hannes Swoboda (2012–2014).

Pittella served as one of the 14 vice-presidents of the European Parliament from 14 July 2009 to 1 July 2014. Following the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy, he was elected with 96 percent of the votes as the president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the second largest political group at the European Parliament and the only one with members from all 28 European Union member states. In addition to his committee assignments and party functions, Pittella served on the Parliament's delegation. He was previously a member of the delegation for relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo (2009–2014), with Australia and New Zealand (2002–2004), and with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (1999–2002).

Earlier in 2012 while still in Brussels, Pittella had introduced Simona Mangiante to Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta reportedly with high level ties with the Russian government. At the time, Mangiante worked for the European Parliament as an attorney specializing in child abduction cases. Later, she worked as an administrator to the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs during the Seventh European Parliament. In 2018, Mangiante said that he "always saw Mifsud with Pittella" and that Pittella, who did not comment, suggested she go to work for Mifsud in London.

Return to Italian politics

In the 2018 Italian general election, Pittella was elected to the Senate of the Republic, having been invited to stand by Democratic Party secretary Matteo Renzi. He subsequently resigned as leader of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group. In 2021, Pittella was elected mayor of Lauria. In 2022, Pittella left the Democratic Party and alongside his brother, who was not chosen as candidate within the Democratic Party, joined the Action party led by former Democratic Party member Carlo Calenda. Ahead of the 2024 Basilicata regional election, Pittella dissented from his brother, who alleged vetoes within the centre-left coalition and went on to successfully join the centre-right coalition in support of the incumbent president Vito Bardi.

Personal life

Pittella is married and has two children. Besides his political work, he is the author of several books, including among others on the future and challenges of the European project, such as Rosso Antico (1996), Diario di bordo (1997), Sparlare, parlare, pensare (1998), Eurodiario (1999–2000), Il Triangolo della ricchezza (2003), Europ@ (2004), Dal Sud in Europa con te (2004), Partiti europei e gruppi politici nel nuovo europarlamento dell'Unione a 25 (2004), Un'Europa per i cittadini (2006), and Brief History of the Future of the United States of Europe (2013). He was the founder and director of the magazine Il Segno Mediterraneo. He is also a visiting professor at the University of East Anglia's London Academy of Diplomacy and ex-officio member of the bureau of the Fondation européenne d'études progressistes (FEPS). Pittella is an honorary citizen of the city of Buenos Aires. In September 2013, his younger brother, Marcello Pittella, whose political trajectory is very similar to that of his older brother, won the centre-left coalition primary election for the presidency of Basilicata. In November 2013, he was elected president by a landslide.