Look back at Giorgio Napolitano: learn the limits of dogma and the potential of good leaders to change lives | Martin Kettle

The former Italian president was a communist who learned that utopianism does not work and the common good involves compromise

It’s not every day that you see a pope paying tribute to a former communist – but it happened this week in Rome. By the same token, it is a surprise to hear one of the church’s most senior cardinals make an affectionate and generous address at the same communist’s strictly secular, defiantly non-religious, funeral – at which attenders included Emmanuel Macron – but these things, no less unusually, happened this week, too.

But then Giorgio Napolitano, who died a week ago aged 98 and whose funeral took place in Rome on Tuesday, was no ordinary president of Italy and no ordinary communist either. A lifelong member of the Italian Communist party until it dissolved in 1991, Napolitano was elected president in May 2006. He was also, very reluctantly, the first Italian president to be re-elected to serve a second term in 2013. Until the current president, Sergio Mattarella, overtakes him in a few days’ time, he was Italy’s longest serving head of state since 1945.