Valdo Spini (born 20 January 1946 in

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

) is an Italian politician and author. A long-time member of the

Italian Socialist Party The Italian Socialist Party (, PSI) was a socialist and later social-democratic political party in Italy, whose history stretched for longer than a century, making it one of the longest-living parties of the country. Founded in Genoa in 189 ...

(PSI), in 1994 he founded the Labour Federation (FL), of which he was leader until 1998, when FL merged into the

Democrats of the Left The Democrats of the Left ( it, Democratici di Sinistra, DS) was a social-democratic political party in Italy. The DS, successor of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the Italian Communist Party, was formed in 1998 upon the merger of th ...

(DS) party. He has since been a leading member of the Socialist faction within the DS (1998–2007). He was elected to the Italian

Chamber of Deputies The chamber of deputies is the lower house in many bicameral legislatures and the sole house in some unicameral legislatures. Description Historically, French Chamber of Deputies was the lower house of the French Parliament during the Bourbon Res ...

in 1979, and re-elected seven times, remaining in office as an MP until 2008. From 1981 to 1984 he was national Vice-Secretary of the PSI. He joined the Cabinet of Prime Minister

Giuliano Amato Giuliano Amato (; born 13 May 1938) is an Italian politician who twice served as Prime Minister of Italy, first from 1992 to 1993 and again from 2000 to 2001. Later, he was Vice President of the Convention on the Future of Europe that drafted t ...

in 1993-94 as Minister of the Environment. Previously he was Undersecretary of State for Interior Affairs and then Foreign Affairs. He served as Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Chamber of Deputies from 1996 to 2001. He was also elected member in 2009 of the Town Council of Florence, where he currently serves as President of the Institutional Affairs Committee, and is the leader of his own "SpiniperFirenze", an independent civic movement. He has been editor (since 1981) of the "Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli" (Firenze, Alinea ed), a political culture magazine published by the "Circolo Rosselli" Foundation, a Florence-based think-tank, of which he is President. He is now also President of the Coordination of Italian Cultural Reviews (CRIC). His last book is "Vent'anni dopo la Bolognina", 2010. ("Twenty Years After ''the Bolognina''", referring to the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party at the end of the Cold War) Valdo Spini is a Waldensian and the son of Giorgio Spini, a prominent Italian historian who died in 2006.

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