Giulio Andreotti OMI SMOM OCSG OESSH was an Italian politician and statesman who served as the 41st prime minister of Italy and leader of the Christian Democracy party; he was the sixth longest-serving prime minister since the Italian Unification and the second longest-serving post-war prime minister, after Silvio Berlusconi. Andreotti is widely considered the most powerful and prominent politician of the so-called First Republic.
Beginning as a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, Andreotti achieved cabinet rank at a young age and occupied all the major offices of state over the course of a forty-year political career, being seen as a reassuring figure by the civil service, business community, and Vatican. In foreign policy, he guided Italy's European Union integration and established closer relations with the Arab world. Admirers of Andreotti saw him as having mediated political and social contradictions, enabling the transformation of a substantially rural country into the world's fifth-biggest economy. Critics said he had done nothing to challenge a system of patronage that had led to pervasive corruption.