Salvatore Formica (born 1 March 1927), best known as Rino Formica, is a former Italian politician.
Biography
Formica was born in
Bari
Bari ( ; ; ; ) is the capital city of the Metropolitan City of Bari and of the Apulia Regions of Italy, region, on the Adriatic Sea in southern Italy. It is the first most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy. It is a port and ...
. He became a member of national importance of the
Italian Socialist Party (Italian: ''Partito Socialista Italiano'', or simply PSI) during the leadership of
Bettino Craxi. He was several times Minister of the Italian Republic starting from 1980. He was Minister of Budget in the
Spadolini II Cabinet, whose fall was caused by a quarrel between Formica and the other economy minister
Beniamino Andreatta.
Formica was strongly critical of the PSI's transformation from a popular, social-based party into one involved in numerous corruption and official malfeasance scandals under Craxi. He declared "the convent is poor, but the monks are rich" (in reference to PSI's financial problems, where its members were instead increasingly well endowed), and defined PSI's national assembly as "a court of dwarves and
ballerinas. Formica was one of the numerous PSI members involved in the
Mani Pulite scandal of the early 1990s, although he was acquitted in the two trials raised against him.
After Craxi's resignation as PSI national secretary in 1993, he supported
Claudio Martelli as his successor. In 1994 he was not re-elected to the Italian Parliament for the first time since the 1970s.
In 2003, he founded a party called Socialismo è Libertà and later adhered to the new
Italian Socialist Party, a small-sized formation of socialists who did not join the centre-left
Democratic Party or the centre-right
New PSI.
Electoral history
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Formica, Rino
1927 births
Living people
People from Bari
Italian Socialist Party politicians
Ministers of finance of Italy
Government ministers of Italy
Ministers of transport of Italy