The politician from Puglia has accumulated a long experience in Italy and Europe, going from a promising young man to a star of the center-right. He has lived through all its incarnations: from the DC to Fratelli d’Italia, spending twenty years in Berlusconi’s wake, often with budgetary roles
Italy has officially nominated its member for the European Commission, Raffaele Fitto, after having received the approval of President Ursula von der Leyen and that of the leader of the European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, in recent days.
The final green light for the role, for which he was in any case the only real candidate, came after a meeting of the Council of Ministers on Friday afternoon. “Today I will communicate the name” of Raffaele Fitto to President von der Leyen, said Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during the summit.
“Our choice falls on a person who has a great deal of experience and who has been able to govern the delegations entrusted to him in this government with excellent results” continued Meloni.
Fitto, despite his age (55 years old), already has a long political career behind him, which began in Puglia.
Born in Maglie, in the province of Lecce in 1969, and graduated in Law, he was elected Regional Councilor with the Christian Democrats (DC) in 1990, the first of a series of positions that would have brought him to Brussels first as a deputy (in 1999, 2014 and 2019) and today as a commissioner.
Let’s see who Fitto is and how he came to be part of the new European executive, in which the responsibilities and portfolio he will have remain to be defined, with the possibility of an executive vice-presidency of the Commission also up for grabs.
Fitto, elected at 21 with the DC: then with Forza Italia and Fratelli d’Italia
A son of a politician (his father Salvatore was president of Puglia in the 1980s), Fitto seems like a politician suited to all occasions (he has been defined several times as “the right man”, but also “golden boy” and even “thoroughbred” by Silvio Berlusconi).
A look at his “packed” curriculum vitae confirms this.
From his first roles as a deputy and councilor for Tourism in the 1990s, Fitto became governor of Puglia in 2000, just ten years after his debut in politics and at just 31 years old (still a record in Italy).
A rise that, after the first stint in the European Parliament (from which he resigned after a year for the regional presidency), made him make the leap into national politics, in 2006, with the election to the Chamber of Deputies on the lists of Forza Italia (FI) and, two years later, of the People of Freedom (both political formations led by Berlusconi).
Shortly after, he was appointed Minister for Regional Affairs (2008), to which was later added the delegation for Territorial Cohesion, a role that increasingly defined him as an administrator and manager of public funds.
Fitto returned to government in Italy only in 2022, when Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called him to be Minister for European Affairs and the South. A long stint motivated by commitments in Brussels, where he also carries out most of his work, given the responsibility assigned to him also in the management of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).
With approximately 194 billion euros, Italy is the European country that has obtained the most funds in absolute terms, much of it in debt, which has put the plan and indirectly Fitto at the center of criticism.
The most ferocious have concerned the spending priorities decided by the government, but also the delays in spending the installments of the funds granted by the EU.
According to data from the European Commission, in reality, Italy has so far achieved about a third of the agreed objectives, placing itself above the EU average, although behind Denmark, Estonia, France, Luxembourg and Malta, which have much less substantial plans.
Fitto and the European Union: first a member of parliament, then president of the ECR group in Parliament
In 2015, Fitto participated in the creation of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, despite having been re-elected the year before as an MEP by FI, historically affiliated with the European People’s Party.
The reason was the disagreements with Berlusconi, due to the center-right leader’s openings to constitutional reforms in agreement with Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party. Fitto and others left the party to found Direzione Italia and later Noi con l’Italia.
Fitto became vice-president and finally co-president of the ECR in 2019, after his third election to the European Parliament with yet another party, the majority party Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, with which he also returned to the Chamber in September 2022, resigning as an MEP).
In this capacity, according to some observers, Fitto would have sewn up the relationship between Fratelli d’Italia and the European Populars, to discard the label of far-right party and run for a coalition with von der Leyen.
The idea foundered in the decisive European Council at the end of June, sanctioned by the vote against the reconfirmation of the president of the Commission by FdI, but it seems to have further tightened the relationship of the politician from Puglia with the prime minister.
Having lost the game for the top roles of the Union in fact, in which she wanted a greater role to be recognized for Italy (one of the few countries in which the European elections have rewarded the government in office), Giorgia Meloni immediately committed to obtaining a seat of power in the Commission.
Nothing better for this objective and for Meloni’s choice (supported on this by her allies) than someone like Fitto who has frequented the EU palaces for years (perhaps second in this sense in the majority to Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani) and who has done so in particular by managing the post-pandemic community funds.
With all due respect to the fact that President von der Leyen had asked for two candidacies, one male and one female, to rebalance the new Commission in terms of gender.
From Puglia to Brussels in the footsteps of his father Salvatore Fitto
A football and motorbike enthusiast, the young Fitto seemed oriented towards a destiny other than politics, if it had not been for the premature death in 1988 of his father, due to a car accident while he was governor.
The political career of the new EU commissioner has been marked by some legal issues, from which he was acquitted except for one for corruption still pending in civil proceedings.
According to his Instagram profile, Fitto is married with three children: two sons and a daughter.
This article is originally published on it.euronews.com
