A professional politician, in the sense that politics has been his main work during all his life, he comes from the PCI, Italian Communist Party, part of which later gave origin to his current party, and in the 1990s became Head of the government, after the "Tangentopoli" (or "Clean hands") scandals, as the leader of the "Olive" leftist coalition.
In the internal life of his party, mostly during the passage from PCI to PDS, D'Alema stressed that the communist heritage should have been mildened, or even replaced by an opening toward catholic forces, somehow leaving aside the marxist provenance.
He has been the director of "L'Unità", the official PCI's newspaper.
