Fausto Bertinotti (born 22 March 1940) is an Italian politician who led the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) from 1994 to 2006. On 29 April 2006, after the centre-left coalition's victory in the Italian general election, he was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies, a position he held until 2008. Trade unionist Bertinotti was born to Enrico Bertinotti, a railroad engineer, and Rosa Bertinotti. After completing his education in Milan, he joined the CGIL (General Confederation of Italian Labour) in 1964, becoming secretary of the local organisation of the Federazione Italiana degli Operai Tessili (Italian Textile Workers Federation). Three years later, he became president of the labour chamber of Novara. From 1975 to 1985 he was regional secretary of the CGIL in Piedmont. 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 this role he took part in the great workers' struggles of the time, including that of the Fiat workers which ended with a 35-day occupation of the car manufacturer's factory. A committed and hardline trade unionist, Bertinotti affirmed the need for the working class to strike against the "injustices of the boss class", thereby attracting the anger of more moderate trade unionists. At that time he first disagreed with Sergio Cofferati, beginning a polemic which has continued, albeit in different forms, until the present. 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. Political career Bertinotti did not readily find a political party during the First Italian Republic which conformed to his principles. He was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and then the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity before joining the Italian Communist Party, in which he was a member of Pietro Ingrao's tendency. 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). Nevertheless, he did not immediately join