He didn’t make it, David Sassoli. The President of the European Parliament, hospitalized since December 26 for a severe form of immune system dysfunction, died at 1.15 am at the age of 65. He was in the Aviano cancer center, in the province of Pordenone. His spokesperson for years, Roberto Cuillo, gave the news. In the next few hours, the date and place of the funeral will be known.
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Yesterday Cuillo had also announced the cancellation of all official commitments of the president. And immediately messages of solidarity arrived from every political force and from the institutions of the Union. And yesterday, from Sassoli’s Twitter account, a message was sent to remember Silvia Tortora, Enzo’s daughter.
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Sassoli – married and with two children – had already had to cancel his institutional commitments from September to early November of last year, due to a “bad” pneumonia due to the Legionella bacterium, as he himself had explained in a video posted on Twitter after the healing.
A disease that had prevented him from chair the plenary session in which the president of the Commission von der Leyen had delivered the speech on the state of the Union In December Sassoli had said that he would not reappear at the helm of the European Parliament. And next Thursday the election of his successor was scheduled for the second half of the legislature.
Journalist, TV presenter, deputy director of Tg1, Sassoli entered politics as a member of the Democratic Party in 2009. A life with two great passions: journalism and politics, especially in a European key. An experience, that in the institutions of the Union, which culminated with the election at the helm of the Strasbourg assembly on 3 July 2019 (already in 2014 he had been vice president). In 2013, however, he had tried to grapple with national politics by running in the primaries for the mayor of Rome: arrived before Paolo Gentiloni but after the winner, Ignazio Marino.
Born in Florence, David Sassoli had moved to Rome from an early age following his father, a journalist. The Virgilio classical high school, then the enrollment in political science, Sassoli immediately passed to professional practice: The weather, the Asca agency, the Roman editorial staff of Day and then Rai, where he was hired in 1992.
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