The Italian statesman Bettino Craxi (born 1934) was the youngest person and the first socialist to become prime minister of the Italian republic. He resigned after three and a half years in office due to problems with his coalition government. In the 1990s he was one of the targets of the largest corruption investigation in Italian post-war history and sentenced to 21 years in prison for his crimes. He went into self-imposed exile in Tunisia

Bettino Craxi was born February 24, 1934, in Milan, Italy, where his lawyer father, a Socialist politician, had migrated from his native Sicily. Christened Benedetto, but known by the diminutive "Bettino" ever since he was a child, Craxi as a teenager once thought of becoming a priest. Instead, he turned to politics. At 14 he worked in his father's unsuccessful 1948 campaign for the Chamber of Deputies. At the University of Milan he enrolled to study law, but because of his political commitments he never completed his degree.

At 18 he joined the Socialist Party and was active in its youth movement and its publications. During the next few years he rose steadily through the party's ranks and was elected to local and then national offices. In 1957 he was made a member of the party's national central committee. In 1960, in his first electoral success, he won a seat on the Milan city council. In 1965 he was named secretary of the Socialist Party in Milan and a member of the national party's executive committee. In 1968 he won election to the Chamber of Deputies as a delegate from Milan. He retained that seat in each of the four succeeding general elections.

At the outset of his parliamentary career Craxi was an unknown. According to public opinion polls, 90 percent of the Italian people had never heard of him. Through patient organization and skillful use of contacts, Craxi worked his away to the leadership of the party. In 1970 Craxi became a deputy secretary of the Socialist Party and gradually began to build his power base within the organization. After the Socialists stumbled badly in the 1976 general election, Craxi made a bid for the party's leadership. On July 16, 1976, he became the compromise candidate for the position of party general secretary.

The last main turning point of his career began in 1992. In February 1992, Socialist MP Mario Chiesa was caught by the police while taking a 7 million lira (4000€) bribe from a cleaning service firm. Mario Chiesa sought Craxi's protection for nearly a month; but Craxi accused him of casting a shadow on the 'most honest party in Italy'.

Feeling emarginated and unjustly singled-out, Chiesa agreed to tell everything he knew to the prosecutors. His revelations brought half of Milan Socialists and Industrialists under investigation. As a consequence, a team of Milanese judges began investigating specifically the party financing system. Milan was then a stronghold of the Italian Socialist Party. At a time, even the city mayor, Paolo Pillitteri, Craxi's own brother-in-law, was investigated (although he had immunity as a Member of Parliament).

In July 1992, Craxi finally realised the situation was serious, and that he himself was going to be hit by the unfolding scandal. He made an appeal before the Chamber of Deputies in which he told his fellow deputies that everyone knew of the widespread irreguralities in the public financing of parties, accused them (the deputies) of hypocrisy and cowardice, and finally called for solidarity (and protection from prosecution) from all MPs to his party. However, his call was ignored. Craxi took 5 more months to realize the full scale of the events, but some important MPs took even longer and by the time they knew, everything was done and they were wiped off the political map (and thrown in jail).

The incident inevitably marked a turning point; nothing would be the same anymore. In the regional elections of 1993 Lombardy passed to Northern League leadership after 16 years of socialist rule. In some regions, the PSI vote was under 4%. However, the disasters didn't stop there.

Craxi escaped the laws he had once contributed to make, by fleeing to Hammamet in Tunisia in 1994, and remained a fugitive there, protected by Ben Ali's government. He repeatedly declared himself innocent, but never returned to Italy where he had been sentenced to 27 years in jail because of his corruption crimes (of these, 9 years and 8 months were upheld on appeal). He died on 19 January 2000, at the age of 65, from complications of diabetes.