De Gasperi is the politician who made Christian Democracy the governing form of postwar Italy, and one of the small group who converted Catholic social teaching into a European institutional order.
Born in the Trentino when it was Austrian, he sat in the Vienna parliament before he sat in an Italian one, which left him with a genuinely supranational formation unusual among Italian politicians. He led the Popular Party against Mussolini, was imprisoned after the fascist seizure of power, and spent the next sixteen years in internal exile working as a cataloger in the Vatican Library — a period he used to think through what a Catholic party that was neither clerical nor authoritarian would look like.
As prime minister from 1945 to 1953 he held together a state with no functioning administration, a shattered economy and the largest communist party in Western Europe. His answer was a broad interclass party disciplined by anti-communism, land reform and industrial development financed by Marshall aid, and firm alignment with the Atlantic alliance — a settlement that gave Italy the Republic, the 1948 constitution, and the economic miracle, at the cost of an entrenched governing party whose long clientelism eventually consumed it.
With Schuman and Adenauer he was a founder of the European Coal and Steel Community. The three shared Catholicism, a border-region background, and German as a working language, and their project was explicitly designed to make war between France and Germany impossible by fusing the industries that fought it. He is one of the very few politicians to be both a national founder and a supranational one.