He didn’t make it, David Sassoli. The President of the European Parliament, hospitalized since December 26 for a severe form of immune system dysfunction, died at 1.15 am at the age of 65. He was in the Aviano cancer center, in the province of Pordenone. His spokesperson for years, Roberto Cuillo, gave the news. In the next few hours, the date and place of the funeral will be known.
Yesterday Cuillo had also announced the cancellation of all official commitments of the president. And immediately messages of solidarity arrived from every political force and from the institutions of the Union. Even yesterday, from Sassoli’s Twitter account, a message was sent to remember Silvia Tortora, Enzo’s daughter.
Sassoli – married and with two children – had already had to cancel his institutional commitments from September to early November of last year, due to a “bad” pneumonia due to the Legionella bacterium, as he himself had explained in a video posted on Twitter after the healing.
An illness that had prevented him from presiding over the plenary session in which the president of the Commission von der Leyen had delivered the speech on the state of the Union. In December Sassoli had said that he would not reapply as head of the European Parliament. And next Thursday the election of his successor was scheduled for the second half of the legislature.
Journalist, TV presenter, deputy director of Tg1, Sassoli entered politics as a member of the Democratic Party in 2009. A life with two great passions: journalism and politics, especially in a European key. An experience, that in the institutions of the Union, which culminated with the election at the helm of the Strasbourg assembly on 3 July 2019 (already in 2014 he had been vice president). In 2013, however, he tried to grapple with national politics by running for the primaries for the mayor of Rome: he arrived before Paolo Gentiloni but after the winner, Ignazio Marino.
Born in Florence, David Sassoli had moved to Rome from an early age following his father, a journalist (but he had remained a Fiorentina fan). The Virgilio classical high school, then the enrollment in political science, Sassoli immediately passed to professional practice: The weather, the Asca agency, the Roman editorial office of Day and then Rai, where he was hired in 1992. And in Rai he became one of the most familiar faces for the general public, as host of Tg1, up to the deputy directorate in the era of Gianni Riotta.
Among his latest battles, the commitment to remote voting in the Covid era in the European Parliament and that for rights in Russia and the Navalny case, for which he ended up on the Moscow blacklist.
At dawn the homage of politics on social media began. Among the first was the message of Minister Dario Franceschini.
And then the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen: “Rest in peace, proud Italian”.
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