The illegitimate son of a single mother who raised him on a pension, Anthony Albanese had a humble start to life for an aspiring Australian prime minister.
But despite his disadvantaged upbringing in public housing in Sydney, the man known since childhood as Albo has risen to the top of the center-left Australian Labor Party and is now only an election away from potentially realizing his ambition to lead the national government.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an election on May 21.
As a young child, to spare Albanese the scandal of being illegitimate in a working-class Roman Catholic family in socially conservative 1960s Australia, he was told that his Italian father Carlo Albanese had died in a car accident shortly after marrying his ethnic-Irish Australian mother Maryanne Ellery in Europe.
His mother, who became an invalid pensioner because of chronic rheumatoid arthritis, told him the truth when he was 14 years old: His father was not dead and his parents had never married.
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