Political career

In 1992, dalla Chiesa joined Leoluca Orlando's new-born left-wing party The Network, for which he was elected at the Chamber of Deputies at the 1992 general election.^[4]

In the 1993 local elections, dalla Chiesa ran for the office of mayor of Milan, supported by his party, by the Democratic Party of the Left, the Communist Refoundation Party and the Federation of the Greens. He reached the runoff, but was defeated by the Northern League candidate, Marco Formentini.^[5]

Dalla Chiesa was not re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the 1994 general election and decided to leave The Network.^[6] He returned to the Chamber of Deputies in the 1996 general election, being elected as an independent in the Federation of the Greens with the support of The Olive Tree coalition.

When in 1998 the first D'Alema cabinet was sworn in, dalla Chiesa refrained from voting for trust because the government was also supported also by Francesco Cossiga with whom dalla Chiesa had a bad relationship, since he accused the former president of Italy of raising many malevolences against his father when he was prefect in Palermo.^[7]

In 2000, he became the co-ordinator in Lombardy of Arturo Parisi's The Democrats and, in the 2001 general election, he was elected to the Senate.^[8] In 2002, The Democrats and the Italian People's Party merged into The Daisy.

Dalla Chiesa did not run for a parliamentary seat again in the 2006 general election, but after the win of The Union he was appointed undersecretary for universities and scientific research in the second Prodi Cabinet.^[9] In 2007, dalla Chiesa was a member of the national directorate of the Democratic Party.^[10]

Writing career

Dalla Chiesa has written several books and essays about politics and the fight against organized crime in Italy. Among his most known works is the 1992 book Il giudice ragazzino (The Boy Judge), a tribute essay dedicated to Rosario Livatino, a young Sicilian judge who had been murdered by the Mafia in 1990. In telling the experience and the tragic end of Livatino, dalla Chiesa reconstructs his vision of the connection between the Mafia, politics and institutions in Sicily and Italy in the late 1980s, indicating the murder of the judge as one of the highest triumphs of criminal powers.^[11]

The 1994 film Law of Courage is based on dalla Chiesa's book.

First-past-the-post elections