Profile: Massimo D'Alema

Mr D'Alema has a reputation as a high-flyer

Massimo D'Alema is regarded as a shrewd strategist, who inspires either liking or loathing.

Leading a dauntingly eclectic ruling coalition including communists, ex-Christian Democrats (DC) and Greens showed him just how much conflicting emotion he could stir up.

"When he applies himself to something he can be really unpleasant," his wife Linda Giuva once told an interviewer.

"Some people like him a lot and some hate him from the bottom of their heart. But everyone knows he's very capable."

Ex-communist

Mr D'Alema's dilemma was how to remain true to the left while having to depend on former members of the DC - the disgraced and now defunct party which successfully kept the communists out of power for half a century.

It was a fitting challenge for a wily operator who began his political career as a boy scout "Pioneer", addressing leaders at a congress of what was the West's most powerful communist party.

In October 1998, he became prime minister after Romano Prodi lost a vote of confidence.

Home and abroad

"The duty of my generation is to take the Italian left into government," Mr D'Alema, 50, wrote in his book A Normal Country.

Mr D'Alema's 14 months in power dealt him foreign as well as domestic challenges.

Just a month after he became premier, Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested in Rome, hurling Italy into a fierce diplomatic row with Turkey, whose demands for his extradition fell on deaf Italian ears.

In May, Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova landed in Rome on his first trip outside Yugoslavia since Nato began air strikes against Yugoslav targets on 24 March.

The Kosovo conflict - about which Mr D'Alema wrote a book - created tensions within Italian ruling ranks. He managed to hold together his coalition by agreeing to press Nato to halt the air raids if a UN Security Council resolution could be reached.

Swift rise

A visit to Italy in March by Iran's President Mohammad Khatami - the first by an Iranian leader to Western Europe since 1979 - was a feather in Mr D'Alema's diplomatic cap.

He furthered an increasingly-confident foreign policy with a visit to Libya, painting Italy as a bridge between its former colony and Europe, and once again as an interlocutor with isolated states in North Africa and the Middle East.

At home, Mr D'Alema tiptoed through the minefield of pension reform - which Italy badly needs but trades unions oppose - by acknowledging change was needed but postponing tough action until the 2000 budget was passed.

Inspired by his father Giuseppe, who joined the underground struggle against fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and later became a communist member of parliament, Massimo D'Alema joined the communist party in 1968 and rose swiftly in the hierarchy.

New left

Italian communism commanded more than a third of the vote at its height 20 years ago. But the fall of the Berlin Wall left it looking like an anachronism and leaders urged reform.

Hardline members walked out to set up their own party rather than join the Democratic Party of the Left, as the DS was known when it was born in 1991.

Mr D'Alema became DS leader in 1994, placing himself and his party firmly in the new European left that has gained sway in Britain, France and Germany.

Despite a love of Woody Allen films and a passion for sailing, Mr D'Alema, a former editor of party paper L'Unita, comes across as an intellectual who does not suffer fools gladly.

Mr D'Alema has a reputation as an ambitious high-flyer. He gave up his philosophy studies at Pisa University to concentrate on politics and his hobbies include a highly-tactical card game.

He was born in Rome, is married with two children and is a keen supporter of AS Roma soccer club.