Mino Martinazzoli

Fermo "Mino" Martinazzoli (3 November 1931 – 4 September 2011) was an Italian lawyer, politician, and former minister. He was the last secretary of the Christian Democracy (DC) party and the first secretary of the Italian People's Party (PPI) founded in 1994.

Early life and education
Born in Orzinuovi, Martinazzoli studied at Collegio Borromeo in Pavia, where he received a law degree. He then became a lawyer.

Career
Martinazzoli's political career began in the 1960s and 1970s, when he assumed official roles in Brescia's DC. From 1970 to 1972, he was the province of Brescia president. In 1972, he was elected in the Senate of the Republic, after which he became Minister of Justice in 1983, a position he held for three years. In 1986–1989, he was president of DC's deputies. In 1989–1990, he was Minister of Defence but resigned, together with other ministers of the DC's left-wing, after the approval of a law that strengthened Silvio Berlusconi's monopoly over private TV channels in Italy.

In 1992, when the DC party was being wiped out by the Tangentopoli bribery scandal, Martinazzoli, generally respected as an honest and competent man, was elected national secretary. Despite his efforts, the political crisis which followed the corruption scandals forced him to dissolve the DC in 1994. Martinazzoli then founded a new party, based on similar ideals, whose name recalled that of the ancestor of the DC, the Italian People's Party, which was founded in 1919 by Luigi Sturzo. In the new majoritarian system, Martinazzoli's party placed itself in the political centre between the political left, which included the heirs of the Italian Communist Party, and the political right with the new Berlusconi's Forza Italia, which had allied with the Northern Italy-based regionalist party, the Lega Nord (Northern League), as part of the Pole of Freedoms, and the post-fascist National Alliance as part of the Pole of Good Government. His will not to ally with any of them caused numerous politicians, such as Pierferdinando Casini and Clemente Mastella, to leave the PPI and form the Christian Democratic Centre (CCD), which supported Berlusconi. At the 1994 Italian general election, Martinazzoli formed a centrist alliance known as the Pact for Italy, including PPI and other democratic centrist forces. The result of the election was disappointing, with PPI obtaining 11%, some one third of the DC's consensus before its dissolution. In the same year, he accepted to run as mayor of Brescia for the new centre-left coalition, known as The Olive Tree, winning the final ballot and acting as mayor until 1998.

In 2000, Martinazzoli lost the competition with Roberto Formigoni for the president of Lombardy. After PPI the was dissolved in 2002, Martinazzoli migrated to Mastella's UDEUR in 2004, being appointed as its president, a position from which he resigned in 2005. He died on 4 September 2011, at the age of 79.