Rino Formica

Salvatore Formica (born 1 March 1927), best known as Rino Formica, is a former Italian politician.

Biography Formica was born in Bari. He became a member of national importance of the Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, or simply PSI) during the leadership of Bettino Craxi. He was several times Minister of the Italian Republic starting from 1980. He was Minister of Budget in the Spadolini II Cabinet, whose fall was caused by a quarrel between Formica and the other economy minister Beniamino Andreatta.

Formica was strongly critical of the PSI's transformation from a popular, social-based party into one involved in numerous corruption and official malfeasance scandals under Craxi. He declared "the convent is poor, but the monks are rich" (in reference to PSI's financial problems, where its members were instead increasingly well endowed), and defined PSI's national assembly as "a court of dwarves and ballerinas. Formica was one of the numerous PSI members involved in the Mani Pulite scandal of the early 1990s, although he was acquitted in the two trials raised against him. After Craxi's resignation as PSI national secretary in 1993, he supported Claudio Martelli as his successor. In 1994 he was not re-elected to the Italian Parliament for the first time since the 1970s.

In 2003, he founded a party called Socialismo è Libertà and later adhered to the new Italian Socialist Party, a small-sized formation of socialists who did not join the centre-left Democratic Party or the centre-right New PSI.

In February 2026, he declared that he would vote against the constitutional referendum promoted by Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government on judicial reform. He claimed that it was a law aimed at ushering in an authoritarian shift. He thus joined the socialist committee for the No vote (which also includes Elena Matteotti, granddaughter of Giacomo Matteotti), opposed to the socialists for the Yes vote (such as Bettino Craxi's son, Bobo Craxi). This situation marks yet another split within the Italian socialist diaspora.

Electoral history

ElectionHouseConstituencyPartyVotesResult 1968 Senate of the Republic Apulia – Bari PSI 25,936 Elected 1972 Senate of the Republic Apulia – Bari PSI 20,370 Not elected 1976 Chamber of Deputies Bari–Foggia PSI 25,138 Not elected 1979 Senate of the Republic Lombardy – Milan VI PSI 51,345 Elected 1983 Chamber of Deputies Bari–Foggia PSI 74,895 Elected 1987 Chamber of Deputies Bari–Foggia PSI 75,251 Elected 1992 Chamber of Deputies Bari–Foggia PSI 53,812 Elected