[3] A former professor of economics and international advisor to Goldman Sachs, Prodi ran as lead candidate of The Olive Tree coalition, winning the 1996 election and serving as prime minister until losing a vote of confidence 1998.

On 24 January 2008, he lost a vote of confidence in the Senate and consequently tendered his resignation as prime minister to President Giorgio Napolitano; he continued in office for almost four months for routine business until early elections were held and a new government was formed.

[8] After completing his secondary education at the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto in Reggio Emilia, Prodi graduated in law at Milan's Università Cattolica in 1961 with a thesis on the role of protectionism in the development of Italian industry.

[11] On 2 April 1978, Prodi and other teachers at the University of Bologna passed on a tip-off that revealed the whereabouts of the safe house where the kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former prime minister, was being held captive by the Red Brigades.

[12] The information was trusted and a police group made an armed blitz in the town of Gradoli, 80 km from Rome, on the following day, 6 April,[12] although Moro was not found.

[15] In 1997, Andreotti declared that the information came from the Bologna section of Autonomia Operaia, a far-left organization with some ties with the Red Brigades, and that Francesco Cossiga also knew the true source.

While Prodi (then Prime Minister) declared that he had no time for an interview, both Mario Baldassarri (senator and vice-minister in two Silvio Berlusconi cabinets) and Alberto Clò (Minister of Industry in Lamberto Dini's cabinet and owner of the house where the séance was performed) responded to the call; they confirmed the circumstances of the séance, and that Gradoli had appeared in several sessions, even if the participants had changed.

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.

[24] 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.

[29] Despite this, those claims were further repeated by the UK Independence Party's Gerard Batten, the member of the European Parliament for London who stated that he was informed of this by Litvinenko, who was his constituent and former FSB operative.

[31][32] After leaving his position in 1989, Prodi ran the Bologna based consulting company Analisi e Studi Economici, which he jointly owned along with his wife.

[39] Prodi's aim was to build a centre-left coalition composed by centrist and leftist parties, opposed to the centre-right alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned from the office of prime minister few weeks before, when Lega Nord withdrew his support to the government.

On 19 February 1996, the outgoing Prime Minister Lamberto Dini announced that he would run in the election with a new party called Italian Renewal, allied with Prodi's Olive Tree rather than Berlusconi's Pole for Freedoms.

During his first premiership, Prodi faced the 1997 Albanian civil unrest; his government proposed the so-called Operation Alba ("Sunrise"), a multinational peacekeeping force sent to Albania in 1997 and led by Italy.

The UN Security Council therefore agreed the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1101 as a stop-gap operation to manage this and buy time, laying the foundations for a planned reconstruction, which after six weeks of debate fell to the Western European Union, creating the Multinational Albanian Police Element around a command structure of Italian Carabinieri, which actually undertook the work of Judicial and Police reconstruction, extending into the elimination of the economic causes of the crisis.

There are those who claim that D'Alema, along with People's Party leader Franco Marini, deliberately engineered the collapse of the Prodi government to become prime minister himself.

Seven of these were part of the former Eastern Bloc (of which three were from the former Soviet Union and four were and still are members of the Central European alliance Visegrád Group), one of the former Yugoslavia (together sometimes referred to as the "A8" countries), and the remaining two were Mediterranean islands and former British colonies.

Shortly before the end of his term as President of the European Commission, Prodi returned to national Italian politics at the helm of the enlarged centre-left coalition, The Union.

The secretary of the Communist Refoundation Party, Fausto Bertinotti, then announced he would run for the leadership, even if only to act as a symbolic candidate, to avoid a one-candidate election.

Prodi led his coalition to the electoral campaign preceding the election, eventually on 9 and 10 April won by a very narrow margin of 25,000 votes, and a final majority of two seats in the Senate.

Preliminary results showed The Union leading the House of Freedoms in the Chamber of Deputies, with 340 seats to 277, thanks to obtaining a majority bonus (actual votes were distributed 49.81% to 49.74%).

Prodi's new cabinet drew in politicians from across his centre-left winning coalition, in addition to Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, an unelected former official of the European Central Bank with no partisan membership.

[56] The major effort of foreign minister Massimo D'Alema concerned the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon War, being the first to offer troops to the UN for the constitution of the UNIFIL force, and assuming its command in February 2007.

Lawmakers approved the expansion of the US military base Caserma Ederle at the end of January, but the victory was so narrow that Deputy Prime Minister Francesco Rutelli criticised members of the coalition who had not supported the government.

At around the same time, Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, of the coalition member UDEUR, said he would rather see the government fall than support its unwed couples legislation.

[61] After a government meeting on 21 February, Romano Prodi tendered his resignation to the president, Giorgio Napolitano, who cut short an official visit to Bologna in order to receive the prime minister.

In early January 2008, Justice Minister and Union of Democrats for Europe's leader Clemente Mastella resigned after his wife Sandra Lonardo was put under house arrest for corruption charges.

The fall of the government would disrupt a pending election-law referendum that if passed would make it harder for small parties like Mastella's to gain seats in parliament.

[citation needed] On 16 April 2013, just a few days prior to the fourth ballot, Prodi gave a lectio magistralis at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum entitled "I grandi cambiamenti della politica e dell'economia mondiale: c'è un posto per l'Europa?"

Prodi was sponsored by the Angelicum and the Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi[83] on behalf of the Political Science program "Scienze Politiche e del Buon Governo.