Fausto Bertinotti (born 22 March 1940) is an Italian politician who led the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) from 1994 to 2006.

In 1972 he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and soon afterwards became the leader of the most left-wing tendency in the CGIL, called "Essere Sindacato" (to be a union), which harshly criticised the consensus politics of the majority.

In 1994, the year in which he was elected to the secretariat of the Rifondazione Comunista and to the Italian and European parliaments, Bertinotti resigned all his trade union positions.

He remains interested in economics and workers' rights, and has been offered the position of Minister for Labour on several occasions by leaders of the Italian centre-left, but he has always declined it.

Fausto Bertinotti was opposed to the dissolution of the PCI in 1991 and the creation by its reformist majority of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).

He finally broke with PDS leader Achille Occhetto in 1994 and became secretary of the PRC, replacing Sergio Garavini who had led the party since its foundation.

The elections were held on 16 October 2005 and apart from Bertinotti and Prodi, Antonio Di Pietro, Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, Clemente Mastella, Ivan Scalfarotto and Simona Panzino were the candidates.

Bertinotti was elected member of the European Parliament in 2004 on the Rifondazione Comunista list, in which he was candidate in all five electoral districts, receiving some 380,000 votes in all Italy.

[3] For the after the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, Bertinotti suggested the Italian government to adopt a new Keynesianism against the economic recession and a higher level of public expenditure to reabsorb mass disoccupation after the private sectors' collective dismissals.

On 4 June 2023, he took part as a speaker in a cultural meeting organised by the Grand Orient of Italy at Villa Bertelli (in Forte dei Marmi).