De Magistris was born in Naples on 20 June 1967 into a family of
magistrates. He started his career as prosecutor in 1995 and worked in Naples from 1998 to 2002. He was deputy public prosecutor in Catanzaro from 2002 to 2009. His investigations frequently focused on links between politicians and
Italian organised crime. In 2011, de Magistris ran for mayor of Naples as the candidate of
Italy of Values (IdV). He qualified for the runoff by finishing second with 27% of the vote, and subsequently won in the second round, defeating
The People of Freedom (PDL) candidate Gianni Lettieri with 65% of the vote. As his investigations involved famous names such as
Romano Prodi and
Clemente Mastella, de Magistris was at the centre of media controversy. The then Minister of Justice
Clemente Mastella asked de Magistris to be transferred because he had allegedly revealed Mastella's name as well as those of other Italian politicians apparently involved in his investigations. In January 2008, de Magistris appeared before the
High Council of the Judiciary (CSM), the governing board of the
Italian judiciary, to defend himself against the serious allegations of the Minister of Justice and his inspectors. De Magistris was the second most voted politician in the
2009 European Parliament election in Italy. In 2013, he recognised the
State of Palestine and obtained a
Palestinian passport, having received an honorary citizenship by the
Palestinian Authority; he later said that he was the only Italian to hold one and that his was the number six. In 2015, he founded the
left-wing party
Democracy and Autonomy (DemA). In 2016, he won a second term as mayor of Naples after obtaining 42% of the votes in the first round and 66% of the votes in a runoff against Lettieri, the same
centre-right coalition candidate he had defeated five years earlier. In 2017, he obtained the Valerioti-Impastato award for his work against
crime and
corruption. In April 2018, de Magistris wrote to the head of the Naples port authority, Rear Admiral Arturo Faraone, expressing his displeasure with the presence of
USS John Warner (SSN-785) near his city. It had fired six
Tomahawk missiles during the
2018 bombing of Damascus and Homs. He made reference to a resolution passed in 2015 that declared the
Port of Naples a "nuclear-free area". He called Naples a "City of Peace" that respects "the fundamental rights of everyone, convinced of disarmament and international cooperation". In January 2021, de Magistris announced that he would run in the
2021 Calabrian regional election to replace the late
Jole Santelli as the candidate od DemA. In the election held in October 2021, when his term as mayor of Naples also expired, he finished third with 16% of the votes, behind the centre-right coalition candidate
Roberto Occhiuto and the
centre-left coalition and
Five Star Movement candidate
Amalia Bruni. In July 2022, inspired by
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the
New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES), de Magistris launched the People's Union (UP), the successor of the coalition of the left-wing parties that in the
2018 Italian general election had run in the
Power to the People electoral list, to run in the
2022 Italian general election. Mélenchon himself travelled to Italy to take part at a
citizens' assembly at Piazza dei Consoli in Rome, where he endorsed de Magistris' coalition. Notably, in doing so, he ignored the former prime minister and
Five Star Movement (M5S) leader
Giuseppe Conte, who successfully improved his party's fortune by moving the M5S further to the left during the electoral campaign, dismissing the M5S as "an annex of all the powerful people in this country", and argued that left-wing people should vote for de Magistris' People's Union. In the snap election held in September 2022, the People's Union did not cross the 3%
electoral threshold, having received 1.4% of the vote in the
Chamber of Deputies and 1.3% of the vote in the
Senate of the Republic, and thus did not obtain any seat in the
Italian Parliament. De Magistris was leader of the People's Union until he stepped down as spokesperson on 4 March 2024, having announced in March that he would not run for the
2024 European Parliament election in Italy. He also did not exclude another run as mayor fo Naples. == Investigations ==