[8] He joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) at the age of 14 and began his political career in Pisa, where he was studying philosophy.

[1] He was praised as enfant prodige by the then PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti and took part to the protests of 1968, alongside his friend Fabio Mussi.

"[9] According to D'Alema, the other parties registered through the distribution of card packages, while the PCI had a modern form of individual and voluntary registration.

[9] One notable case was a 1995 interview with Lucia Annunziata, which was sensational for its lucidity regarding the relationship between the powers that be and Italian media information.

D'Alema embodied an anthropological turning point, where the Leninist concept of professional revolutionaries was rejected in favour of salaried party executives comparable to public administrators and union officials.

[11] Following the loss of the PDS and Occhetto-led Alliance of Progressives in the 1994 Italian general election, D'Alema supported the creation of The Olive Tree coalition that opened up to centrist and moderate forces, whether secular or Catholic.

[1][2] The same year of the DS foundation, succeeding Romano Prodi, D'Alema became Prime Minister of Italy as the leader of The Olive Tree coalition founded by Prodi and supported by D'Alema that, also thanks to the support of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), which was founded by those who were opposed to the dissolution of the PCI, had won the 1996 Italian general election;[1][2] it was the first general election win for progressives.

In February 1998, the start of the formation process of the DS, which was led by D'Alema, was concluded with the merge of the PDS, the Labour Federation, the Movement of Unitarian Communists, the Social Christians, and exponents of the republican left.

The differences within the majority were accentuated with the formation of the new grouping of The Democrats, which were linked to Prodi and Antonio Di Pietro and that often made the government's path bumpy, and also forced to deal with a difficult situation on the international level, as Italy took part in the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999.

[1][2] D'Alema supported Italy's commitment in the NATO air intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in favour of Kosovo (March–June 1999).

"[10] Additionally, he promoted a Florence conference on the Third Way, in the presence of two personalities far from the tradition of the Italian left: Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

[11] They reminded of the farewell to the permanent job and the dominated relationship with Cofferati, sympathy for the Palestinians, that "Bye-bye Condi" directed on the telephone to the then United States secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in order to be heard by journalists, the communist pride, and that Berlusconi's conflict of interest never approved in five years of government and that "Mediaset heritage to defend", which was pronounced during the normalization phase with Berlusconi.

[9] Following the defeat in the 2000 Italian regional elections, which were held in April, he left the offices of prime minister and president of the DS.

[2] Following Prodi's win in the 2006 Italian general election, D'Alema was initially tipped to become president of Italy once the Chamber of Deputies reconvened.

[14] After a couple of days of heated debate, D'Alema stepped back to prevent a fracture between the parties, an act that was applauded by his allies.

He launched an appeal to "all Palestinian groups" to "listen to Abu Mazen, put an end to the rocket attacks against Israel, free the Israeli corporal kidnapped last June, and work to put an end to the violence that has caused so much suffering to the Palestinian people" due to Israeli retaliation;[16] in May 2021, he reiterated that while aggression from Hamas is unacceptable, "there is a lack of truth in the way this tragedy is being addressed.

"[17] He served in those posts until Prodi's government fell and Berlusconi's The People of Freedom (PdL) prevailed in the 2008 Italian general election.

[19] November 2006 saw the publication of telephone interceptions between the chairman of the Mitrokhin Commission, Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, and Scaramella.

In the wiretaps, Guzzanti made it clear that the true intent of the Mitrokhin Commission was to support the hypothesis that Prodi would have been an agent financed or in any case manipulated by Moscow and the KGB.

[22] In the wiretaps, Scaramella had the task of collecting testimonies from some ex-agents of the Soviet secret service refugees in Europe to support these accusations; he was later charged for calumny.

[23] In a December 2006 interview given to the television program La storia siamo noi,[24] colonel ex-KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky, whom Scaramella claimed as his source, confirmed the accusations made against Scaramella regarding the production of false material relating to D'Alema, Prodi, and other Italian politicians,[25] and underlined their lack of reliability.

[26] In 2010, D'Alema was elected president of the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR), a position he held until 2013,[27] and of the Foundation of European Progressive Studies (FEPS).

[9] Since 2013, he was within the left-wing minority of the PD, alongside Pierluigi Bersani, Pippo Civati, and Roberto Speranza, to Matteo Renzi and the Renziani.

[2] In the words of Francesco Cundari, author of the book Déjà-vu, in which he recounts twenty-five years of the Italian left, "[i]f on the one hand Veltroni and D'Alema can be reproached for a certain oligarchic conception of the party and of politics, on the other hand they should be recognized that in this way even the internal conflicts of that leadership group have never taken the form of tribal wars, as happened in the Democratic Party from the time of the Bersani–Renzi primary onwards.

[10] D'Alema became an Extraordinary Professor at Link Campus University, and continued his work as president of the Italianieuropei Foundation (since 2000) and director of the magazine of the same name,[6] which he founded in 1998.

[2] During a party reunion in 2019 to celebrate his 70 years, D'Alema paraphrased Vladimir Putin's quote about the Soviet Union, and said: "Whoever wants to restore communism is brainless, whoever doesn't remember it is heartless... and I'm deeply sentimental.

Italy led negotiations with the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni and was proposed by Israel to head the multinational peacekeeping mission Unifil.

[42][43][44] D'Alema's passions include association football, and he is a supporter of AS Roma, which he compared to the political left, and said "we who are not used to winning the big games, we trained to suffer and unprepared to rejoice.

"[45] Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister of Italy, made him heir for life to the presidency of the Roma parliamentary group at Montecitorio.

"[45] D'Alema published many books, several of which with Mondadori, which is controlled by Fininvest, the family holding company of Silvio Berlusconi, whose first government he staunchly opposed.