The new Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, took the oath

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Roma.- The new Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, officially assumed his duties on Tuesday in the traditional swearing-in ceremony for the Constitution.

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, university professor and judge of the Constitutional Court, who began his political life 30 years ago in the ranks of the once powerful Christian Democracy, was interrupted by applause more than 40 times, including by 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 stated. “Democracy is not a definitive conquest,” he stressed. The twelfth 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 judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, murdered by the mafia, and to a baby two years after he died in an attack against 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 the murder of his brother in a Cosa Nostra attack, also defended “the right to work” and opted for the cleaning up of the economy. for Europe to grow economically, he warned. Interpreted as a gesture of rapprochement, the president invited the magnate and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, along with all the country’s political leaders, to the official ceremony at the Quirinale palace, headquarters of the presidency.

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