Giulio Andreotti

Giulio Andreotti rose as a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, reaching cabinet rank young and spending forty years commanding the levers of the Italian state - Interior, Defence, Finance, Foreign Affairs, and seven turns as prime minister between 1972 and 1992. He founded the National Healthcare Service, contained inflation after the 1973 oil crisis, guided Italy into deeper European integration, and held the confidence of the Vatican, business, and the civil service. His Christian Democracy steered a substantially rural country into the world's fifth-largest economy, though critics saw a master of patronage presiding over systemic corruption. At the peak of his power the prosecutions began: courts established his links to Cosa Nostra until 1980, and Perugia charged him with ordering a murder, winning a guilty verdict before acquittal on appeal. He remained a senator for life until his death in 2013, having occupied the center of the First Republic longer and more completely than anyone else.