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. Peppe Giudice (2026) 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==