The new Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, was sworn in

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Roma.- Italy’s new president, Sergio Mattarella, officially took office on Tuesday in the traditional constitutional swearing-in ceremony.

Mattarella, 73, elected president last Saturday by parliament, paid tribute in his first speech to his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano, 89, who had resigned on January 14.

The speech of the new president, a university professor and judge of the Constitutional Court, who began his political career 30 years ago in the ranks of the once powerful Christian Democrats, was interrupted by applause more than 40 times, including from right-wing parliamentarians and the anti-system Five Star Movement.

“We must avoid the risk that the economic crisis ends up affecting the values ​​on which the social pact of the Constitution is based,” he said. “Democracy is not a definitive achievement,” he stressed. The 12th President of the Republic, elected for a seven-year term, the only person with the right to dissolve Parliament and call early legislative elections, also paid tribute to the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, killed by the mafia, and to a two-year-old baby who died in an attack on the synagogue in Rome in the 1980s.

Mattarella, the first Sicilian to become president of Italy, who personally experienced the horrors of the mafia after his brother was killed in an attack by Cosa Nostra, also defended “the right to work” and supported the recovery of the economy so that Europe could grow economically, he warned. Interpreted as a gesture of rapprochement, the president invited the tycoon and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, along with all the country’s political leaders, to the official ceremony at the Quirinale Palace, the seat of the presidency.

The former head of government and leader of a right wing in decline, whose last 45 days of community service to which he had been sentenced for tax fraud were reduced on Monday, will be able to attend the solemn ceremony, despite having been expelled from the Senate.