Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Italian leader, 1920-2016

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the former Italian president, prime minister and central bank governor who has died at the age of 95, represented the finest tradition of public service in a country plagued all too often by corruption and clientelism.

At a time of great domestic turmoil in the early 1990s, Ciampi played a crucial role in stabilising Italy’s economy and democratic institutions, and he later prepared the ground for the country to become a founder member of Europe’s monetary union.

He crowned his career in 1999 when, at the age of 79, he received the highest honour and was made Italy’s president, or head of state. He filled the partly ceremonial, partly political post so well that, despite his advanced years, many Italian politicians wanted him in 2006 to serve a second seven-year term. Instead he gave way to Giorgio Napolitano and was made a senator for life.

Born in the Tuscan city of Livorno on December 9 1920, Ciampi was obliged in 1941 to join the Italian army, then fighting alongside Nazi Germany. But after Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, fell from power in Rome in 1943, Ciampi became a partisan in the Italian resistance.

He married Franca Pilla in 1946; they had two children.

Also in 1946, Ciampi started his long career at the Bank of Italy, rising to become head of the central bank’s research department in 1970, director-general in 1978 and finally governor in 1979. He spent almost 14 years running the bank, strengthening its independence from political pressure and enhancing its reputation for professional expertise and honesty.

By 1993 Italy’s party political system was collapsing under the impact of gigantic corruption scandals, and its economy was in disarray because of its enormous public debt, high budget deficits and a humiliating currency devaluation one year earlier.

Ciampi was brought in to become prime minister of an emergency government dominated by non-party technical experts. His administration lasted from April 1993 to May 1994, long enough to pass what he later said was one of his greatest achievements: an agreement among government, employers and trade unions to curb dangerously high labour costs.

At the same time, Ciampi stressed the need to apply greater discipline to public finances so that the nation respected the EU’s so-called Maastricht criteria for forming part of the future single currency area.

In the end, it was as finance minister in Romano Prodi’s 1996-98 government that Ciampi made his most telling contribution to this goal, and Italy duly joined the eurozone in January 1999. Ciampi even chose the design for Italy’s one euro coin: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man sketch.

That May, parliamentarians of left and right put on a rare display of bipartisan consensus to elect Ciampi the nation’s 10th president since the creation of the postwar republic in 1948.

For some of Italy’s European allies, it was a choice that was to prove important in 2001, when Silvio Berlusconi swept to power at the head of an amorphous centre-right coalition that often appeared disdainful of the nation’s pro-European foreign policy traditions.

The French and Germans, in particular, came to view Ciampi as a guarantor of Italy’s traditional policies. Ciampi himself was a dedicated Europeanist but he never lost sight of the importance of the US-Italian alliance.

On the domestic front, some centre-left politicians thought Ciampi should have been more outspoken in criticising the Berlusconi government. Ciampi vetoed two laws, on the media sector and judicial reform, that were dear to the government’s heart. They were later passed in modified form.

Ciampi’s abiding concern was not to damage Italian democracy by overusing the presidency’s limited powers to restrain a freely elected government such as Mr Berlusconi’s. However, his speeches on media pluralism made clear that he was uncomfortable with the domination of Italian television by the Berlusconi family’s media empire.

As head of state, Ciampi tried to embody a spirit of national unity and self-confidence, both sometimes lacking in modern Italy, by urging his fellow Italians to take pride in their country. In what rarely looked like a winning cause, he also urged politicians to show each other respect and to raise the tone of public debate.