Amintore Fanfani (February 6, 1908 - November 20, 1999) was an Italian career politician and the 33rd man to serve the office of Prime Minister of the State. He was one of the well known Italian politicians after the Second World War, and a historical figure of the Christian Democracy (Italian: Democrazia Cristiana – DC).

Fanfani and Giovanni Giolitti are still actually the sole men which became Prime ministers of Italy in five different periods. However, the sum of the days of Fanfani's five terms are 1571 (four years, 110 days), while Silvio Berlusconi spent 1801 days (four years, 340 days) at office in his second term only (2001 - 2006). Fanfani was one of the dominant figures of the Italian Christian Democrats for over three decades.

Fanfani was born in Pieve Santo Stefano, in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, to a large and humble family. He graduated in economics and business in 1932 from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He was the author of a number of important works on economic history dealing with religion and the development of capitalism in the Renaissance and Reformation in Europe. His thesis was published in Italian and then in English as Catholicism, Capitalism and Protestantism in 1935.

He joined the Italian fascist party supporting the corporatist ideas of the regime promoting collaboration between the classes, which he defended in many articles. "Some day," he once wrote, "the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles." He also wrote for the official magazine of racism in Fascist Italy, The Defence of the Race (Italian: La difesa della razza). In 1938, he was among the 330 that signed the antisemitic Manifesto of Race (Italian: Manifesto della razza) – culminating in laws that stripped the Italian Jews of Italian citizenship and with it any position in the government or professions which many previous had.

During the years he spent in Milan, he knew Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. They formed a group known as the "little professors" who lived ascetically in monastery cells and walked barefoot. They formed the nucleus of Democratic Initiative, an intensely Catholic but economically reformist wing of the post-war Christian Democratic Party, holding meetings to discuss Catholicism and society. After the surrender of Italy with the Allied armed forces on September 8, 1943, the group disbanded. Until the Liberation in April 1945, Fanfani fled to Switzerland dodging military service, and organized university courses for refugee Italians.

Upon his return to Italy, he was elected vice-secretary of the newly founded Christian Democratic Party. He was as one of the youngest party leaders and a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, the undisputed leader of the party for the following decade. Fanfani represented a particular ideological position, that of conservative Catholics who favoured socio-economic interventionism, which was very influential in the 1950s and 1960s but which gradually lost its appeal. "Capitalism requires such a dread of loss," he once wrote, "such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood, such a certainty that a man's neighbour is merely a customer to be gained or a rival to be overthrown, and all these are inconceivable in the Catholic conception ... There is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life." Private economic initiative, in his view, was justifiable only if harnessed to the common good.

He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and was a member of the Commission that drafted the text of the new Republican Constitution. The first article of the new constitution reflected Fanfani's philosophy. He proposed an article, which read: "Italy is a democratic republic founded on work." In 1948 he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

Under de Gasperi, Fanfani took on a succession of ministries. He was Minister of Labour from 1947 – 1948 and again from 1948 – 1950; Minister of Agriculture from 1951 – 1953; as well as Minister of the Interior in 1953 in the caretaker government of Giuseppe Pella. As Minister of Labour, he developed the "Fanfani house" program for government built workers' homes and put 200,000 of Italy's many unemployed to work on a reforestation program. As Minister of Agriculture, he set in motion much of the Christian Democrats' land reform program.

"He can keep going for 36 hours on catnaps, apples and a few sips of water," according to a news report in Time Magazine. Once, when someone proposed Fanfani for yet another ministry, De Gasperi refused. "If I keep on appointing Fanfani to various ministries, I am sure that one of these days I will open the door to my study and find Fanfani sitting at my desk," he said.

After De Gasperi's retirement in 1953 Fanfani emerged as the anticipated successor, a role confirmed by his appointment as party secretary from 1954 - 1959. He reorganized and rejuvenated the national party organization of the Christian Democrats after the dependence on the church and the government which had typified the De Gasperi period. However, his activist and sometimes authoritarian style, as well as his reputation as an economic reformer, ensured that the moderates within the DC, who opposed the state’s intrusion into the country’s economic life, regarded him with distrust. His indefatigable energy and his passion for efficiency carried him far in politics, but he was rarely able to exploit fully the opportunities that he created. "Fanfani has colleagues, associates, acquaintances and subordinates," one politician once remarked. "But I have never heard much about his friends."

After the death of De Gasperi, from 1954 to the mid 1960s Fanfani's weight both in the party and in national politics was at its height. He served as Prime Minister in several governments, some of them short lived. His first government in 1954 lasted only 21 days when it failed to win approval in the Parliament. As Minister of the Interior, with orders to step up measures against Communist subversion, Fanfani had named young (35) Giulio Andreotti, another protégé of De Gasperi.

He became head of government again from July 1958 to January 1959, when his steamroller tactics lost him the support of his own Christian Democratic colleagues. He learned from the experience, and became wiser in the ways of cooperating and compromising. From July 1960 to February 1962, from February 1962 to May 1963, he was Prime Minister once more, securing the support of the Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), thus involving the centre-left in Italian politics.

He had been a leading proponent of such an "opening to the centre-left" for years. The opportunity arose when a liberal Pope, John XXIII, was elected in 1958, and the Socialists loosened their ties with the Communists. In February 1962 he reorganised his cabinet and gained the benign abstention of the PSI leader Pietro Nenni. But he was too powerful to be allowed to be the Prime Minister of the first such government, which actually included the Socialists, and it was instead headed by Aldo Moro.

He failed to become president of the Republic in 1964, and for much of the 1960s he was forced in the background. A strong supporter of the European Economic Community (EEC), Fanfani was foreign minister in 1965 and in 1966 - 68. He also served (1965 – 66) as president of the United Nations General Assembly - he is the only Italian to have held this office. In 1971 he was again his party's candidate for the presidency, but in the secret ballot a sizeable number of his own party colleagues failed to support him. As a consolation, he was made Senator for life in 1972.

He was President of the Senate from 1968 to 1973. Fanfani became secretary of the Christian Democrats for a second time in 1973. As such, he led the campaign for the referendum on repealing the law allowing divorce, which he fought in typically combative style, alienating the pro-divorce groups unnecessarily, without achieving the victory that would have given him predominance in his own party.

The defeat of the divorce referendum provoked his resignation as party secretary in 1975. He had to content himself with the status of President of the Senate, formally the second office of the state. In the later part of his career his aspiration was to be elected President of the Republic, but, notwithstanding the formal party nomination, he never secured the sufficient support in the electoral college.

From 1982 to 1983, Fanfani was Prime Minister for a fifth time. From 1985 to 1987, he was President of the Senate again. From April to July 1987, he was Prime Minister for the sixth time. Fanfani was elected to the prestigious post of chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate from 1994 - 1996.

Fanfani died in Rome on November 20, 1999. He saw the corporate state as the ideal, and in what he calls a "temporary aberration" turned to Fascism. He has never tried to hide his Fascist record; but unlike many of his countrymen, he freely admits that he was wrong. He held all positions and offices a politician could possibly aspire to, except the one he craved most: president of the Republic. The factionalism of the DC turned out to be the biggest obstacle to the emergence of Fanfanismo, the pale Italian version of Gaullism, and one by one he lost his offices.