ON 17 NOVEMBER 1991, the newspaper la Repubblica reported that Christian Democrats and Socialists were comfortably engaged in setting the pattern of politics for the new decade. They had reached agreement to govern together for the next five years, if possible with lower levels of tension than had previously been the case. ‘In the next legislature the present majority can continue as before,’ specified Giulio Andreotti, ‘but it must do so on the basis of clear agreements, without afterthoughts.’ And Antonio Gava proclaimed, rather unwisely in the event, that ‘from now on we will get votes for who we are, and not simply for our anti-communism’.1
Instead, from the time of the national elections of April 1992 onwards, Italy witnessed a profound and dramatic crisis, which not only liquidated the old political élites and parties, but brought them into ignominious disrepute. The crisis was complex and often contradictory in nature. It was not, as 1968 had been, a unifying revolt from below, a contesting of the power and politics of one generation by another. Nor did it have at its heart a single class, or party, or social force which caused it, drove it forward and reaped its benefits. It was not confined to one sphere or sector of Italian life, nor to a merely national theatre. Indeed, viewed from differing vantage points, it presented quite diverse profiles. From the Palace of Justice of Milan it was a battle against corruption and for the restoration of the rule of law. From the Bank of Italy it was a crisis of debt, and of the lack of international confidence in the Italian economy. From Lombardy and the Veneto it was a revolt against Rome in the name of neo-localism and small-scale entrepreneurship. At Montecitorio its focus was on the demise of the old élites, and the impelling need to create new rules and modes of operation for the political system. In the fragile civil society of Palermo it was a desperate fight against Mafia power.
The many faces of the crisis rendered it almost impenetrable to contemporaries, and to none more so than its political victims. Given its complication, both the course and the outcome of the crisis were very difficult to predict, with much of the history of the years after 1992 swinging first one way and then another, and with many fateful decisions balanced on a knife edge.
For the historian, the startling events of 1992–4 present intricate problems of causation and of connection between different planes. In seeking to explain the crisis, it is as well to bear in mind a number of caveats. The first is that it is not very helpful to adopt what may be called a Cassandrian view of recent Italian history, according to which the Italian Republic has been in permanent crisis since its inception, and, riven by its many contradictions, its demise was inevitable and merely a matter of time. While only the most fervent of apologists for the Christian Democrats would attempt to deny the many and deep fault lines of the Republic, to concentrate exclusively on them impedes us from explaining both the timing of the crisis and its specific shape. Rather, as the ensuing account suggests, the crisis owed much to the virtues of Italian democracy as well as to its vices, and is indeed incomprehensible without considering both.
It is also the case that comparisons with the coterminous events in eastern Europe, comparisons which were very frequent among commentators at the time, are rather wide of the mark. If there was a ‘regime’ in Italy, it was not of the eastern European variety. Italy's crisis was one within democracy, in a country which for nearly fifty years had enjoyed free elections and universal suffrage. Civil society certainly had to struggle to affirm itself, in Italy as in Poland, but the parameters of that battle were very different in the two countries.
Lastly, it is probably a mistake to see a single key to the crisis.2 A.J.P. Taylor enjoyed himself suggesting small, technical causes for very large events. Thus the European revolutions of 1848 were caused by the recent invention of the telegraph, and the First World War by the rigidity of the railway timetables of the era. Perhaps the Italian crisis, a much lesser event but still a very complicated one, could never have happened without the magistrate Antonio Di Pietro's computers. However, minimalism of this sort does not take us very far, and a proper explanation would have to try to follow at least three different methodological paths. The first is that of combining different levels of analysis; that is, to examine not just the political sphere but its interaction with other planes of causation – economic, social and cultural. The second is to look at the interdependence of structure and agency, without over-estimating either the role of conscious choice and action in the making of history, or the determining weight of impersonal factors; the last to strike a balance between the significance of long-term causation and that of the immediate flow of events.
In a way, much of the content of the previous chapters of this book is itself an explanation for the dramatic events of the early 1990s. However, to state this is all too easy a way out. Instead, it may be helpful to the reader if I attempt at this point to reorder and present in schematic form the central causal elements which have emerged from the previous pages. Hopefully, the relationship between the various elements of my explanation and its ordering of priorities will then become clear as this chapter unfolds.
On an international plane, it is possible to discern two causal factors of great importance, the one very specific, the other rather vague. Italy's commitment to Europe had been reinforced, as we have seen, by a whole series of choices made in the 1980s and early 1990s, and by the development of the European Community itself towards greater union. These trends acted as an increasingly formidable external constraint upon the nation's behaviour, and especially upon its political economy, an ever heavier judgement on its recent past and requirement for its future behaviour. If ever there was a necessary cause, this was it.
A second international element, of less ponderable weight, was the collapse of Communism. The failure of Gorbachov's reform projects and the dramatic events of 1989–90 had clearly devastating effects upon the Italian Communists, but also significant consequences for anti-Communists as well. Voters who had traditionally backed the governing parties, especially the Christian Democrats, as the best bulwark against the Communists felt free to experiment for the first time. But how far they would have ‘floated’ in any case, that is with or without the fall of the Berlin Wall, must remain an open question.3
In the realm of national politics and institutions, the degradation of party government in the 1980s, its widespread practice of corruption, its incapacity to carry through effective medium-range measures, its overriding smugness and arrogance, were of critical negative importance. When combined with the long-term structural failings of Italy's public administration, they produced an acute version of what had more than once been present in the history of the Italian state – the rejection of ‘Rome’.4
However, the failings of party government and public administration were only part of the institutional story. In every part of the state, and in none more so than the judiciary, there had developed what can perhaps best be called ‘virtuous minorities’, recalcitrant elements who had an obstinate idea that the official morality of the Republic, its laws and Constitution should not serve merely as a figleaf to cover less codified practices. Their actions were to be an explosive element in the crisis. To their endeavours must be added, paradoxically, those of some of their opponents. The more acute members of the political élite themselves saw the case for reform, especially economic reform and that regarding Italy's performance in Europe, as well as the need to enlist the aid of ‘technicians’ to achieve it. Much of the history of Giulio Andreotti's last two governments was an essay in politics of this sort; not crowned by and large with success, but by a further tightening of the noose around the parties’ collective necks; not reforms that served to keep the storm on the distant horizon, but rather brought it nearer.
In societal terms, disgust for the way in which party politicians ruled the country was widespread, but the two critical segments of the modern urban middle classes, which had become the majority of the country's,population found different ways of expressing their dissatisfaction. The one, entrepreneurial and localistic, with family and work often overlaying each other, had gone along with the old political parties for many years. Indeed their interests had often coincided: a blind eye turned by the state towards tax evasion, high interest rates on government bonds as a way of financing the public debt, the contribution of small industry to the commercial balance of the country – these were only some of the elements of a basic alliance between ‘private dynamism and public disorder’.5 As Carlo Trigilia has suggested, such an alliance, or perhaps better tacit understanding, served to mask and delay the crisis for some years. But once the European screws began to be turned towards cutting the annual deficit, reducing the debt and increasing income from taxation, these sections of the middle classes felt increasingly betrayed and exasperated. The state worked no better than before, it provided neither sufficient investment in infrastructures, such as new roads in the Veneto, nor efficient public administration, but it was demanding more from the productive middle classes than in the past. They reacted, especially in the North-East of the country, by seeking new political outlets as well as radical and sometimes xenophobic solutions.
The other key sector of the urban middle classes had its base in the ‘caring’ professions and in many sectors of public employment. They had developed, along with their counterparts in the rest of Europe, ‘reflexive’ and critical attitudes towards many aspects of Italy's helter-skelter modernization. Environmental pollution, the choking of city centres with private transport, indiscriminate private consumption accompanied by much public squalor – these were all elements which fuelled their critique of the politicians’ failure to govern. Individuals and families belonging to this section of society were often left-wing or else Catholic participants in civil society. They believed, more strongly than their entrepreneurial brothers or sisters, in the affirmation of public ethics, and in national rather than local solutions. They identified strongly with the ‘virtuous’ elements in the Republic's history and with the minority of dissenting and reforming personnel within its institutions. The 1980s, for them, had been a decade of suffering in the face of Socialist arrogance, but they had not given up the ghost, and the crisis of 1992 came as an unexpected liberation from a pattern of political behaviour which had seemed timeless and untouchable.
The divisions just outlined are little more than broad markers, for family formation and individual beliefs do not, of course, fit so neatly into sociological pigeonholes. Uniting the majority of Italian families, though, both those of dependent workers and of the self-employed, was steadily widening educational experience. This took the form not of equal educational opportunity, nor even of satisfactory educational standards, but rather an increased stress on the importance of education in a world increasingly dominated by intellectual capital. The education process led to a greater awareness of what things ought to be like, even if they were not. The slow but steady rise in the graphs of the educated, especially among women, was one of the most significant bases for the ‘moral question’, which was to assume such prominence in the crisis of the early 1990s.
The last element of causation was the most violent and intractable. The growing power of organized crime, and in particular the confrontational strategy of the new leadership of the Sicilian Mafia, was a deeply destabilizing influence, particularly as part of the political class of the Republic was in covert but constant contact with it. But here, too, the causal elements were not only negative but positive in character, distinguished as they had been by Caponnetto's Palermo pool of magistrates and the new spirits of an anti-Mafia civil society which were tentatively appearing in the Palermo of the 1980s.
So much for explanation couched in the form of a list; useful but static. Of equal importance is the way these different aspects interacted, and how this interaction developed diachronically. The old political regime could well have survived being bombarded from one direction (it had had enough practice at it). But instead it came under attack simultaneously from many different quarters, and the often fortuitous intermingling of these different planes within a limited arc of time weakened fatally the old ruling groups. Sequentiality, then, what Oakeshott called the recounting of a ‘set of happenings’,6 is also a critical part of explanation, and it is to a series of sequences that this chapter is principally dedicated. What follows is something less than history, for the events recounted are too recent and the sources too few. Hopefully, though, it is something more than a chronicle.
In the months preceding the general elections of 5–6 April 1992 there had been significant warnings for the Italian politicians, but they were not recognized as such at the time. Segni's referendum, the tightening economic climate of 1991–2, the sharp rise in votes for the Northern League at local elections, the assassination of Salvo Lima, all these in their different ways had acted as strong elements of disturbance. To them must be added the arrest in Milan on 17 February 1992 of the Socialist politician Mario Chiesa. We have already encountered Chiesa, and his confessions, in the section of this book dedicated to political corruption.7 He was one of those politicians on-the-make who had prospered with the boom of the 1980s and the system of kickbacks which Bettino Craxi had rendered habitual in his home city of Milan. The circumstances surrounding Chiesa's arrest were interesting, both in symbolic and other terms. The Milanese magistrates had been alerted to his activities by Luca Magni, the owner of the small firm which did the contract cleaning at the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, the old people's home of which Chiesa was President. Magni, and other businessmen like him, had become accustomed to paying kickbacks directly in cash at Chiesa's office at the old people's home. There Chiesa would draw down the blind of his office window, as if in tacit recognition of the covert and illegal nature of the exchange, however much it had become standard practice. The 10 per cent he demanded and his insulting and bullying ways had become intolerable to Magni and others. The magistrate Antonio Di Pietro was informed, Magni went to pay his next tangente with a microphone hidden on his person and the Carabinieri close behind him, and Mario Chiesa was caught in flagrante, trying desperately to flush down the lavatory some 30 million lire. Rarely had one of Craxi's Socialists shown so much haste in attempting to get rid of money rather than to acquire it.8
The reaction of Bettino Craxi to this sequence of events was exemplary. Interviewed on 3 March 1992, he explained wearily: ‘I devote myself to trying to create the conditions for the country to acquire a government which will face the difficult years we have ahead of us, [and] I find myself in front of a rogue who casts a shadow on the whole image of party which in Milan, in fifty years of activity, has never had an administrator condemned for serious crimes concerning the public administration.’9 The ‘rogue’ Chiesa was taken off to the San Vittore prison, while his leader dedicated himself to the forthcoming national elections. There can be little doubt that Craxi's contemptuous dismissal of his erstwhile lieutenant was a crucial factor in provoking Chiesa to recount to the inquiring magistrates the full details of the system of tangenti at Milan.
The elections of April 1992 should have served to confirm the validity of the ‘CAF’, the political alliance between Craxi, Andreotti and Forlani. They did the opposite. The Christian Democrat share of the vote fell to its lowest ever, from 34.3 per cent to 29.7 per cent. The party had held steady in the South, but in some parts of the North, especially in the former ‘white’ areas, its decline was cataclysmic: it lost 18 per cent in the province of Vicenza, 12 per cent in those of Verona and Padova, 13 per cent in that of Belluno.10 The Socialists, far from enjoying the ‘long electoral wave’ about which they had talked so often and for which they had waited more than a decade, lost votes, falling from 14.3 per cent to 13.6 per. cent. They too performed poorly in the North and better in the South. The new PDS achieved a very modest 16.6 per cent and Rifondazione Comunista, the split-off from the rump of the party, 5.6 per cent. Taken together, their vote was lower than that achieved by the PCI at any time since the 1940s, but it was still better than many on the left had feared. By and large, their traditional heartlands in the centre of the country stayed faithful to them.
The undoubted winners of the 1992 elections were the Northern League, which increased its share of the votes from 0.5 per cent to 8.7 per cent. This was, obviously, an overwhelmingly northern vote, and it was one that repaid handsomely Bossi's strategy of trying to break out of his Lombard strongholds. The League gained a startling 25.1 per cent of the vote in Lombardy, but also 19.4 per cent in Piedmont, 18.9 per cent in the Veneto, 15.5 per cent in Liguria, and even 10.6 per cent in the traditionally left-wing Emilia-Romagna. The League's electors were a very composite group, mainly ex-DC voters, though not much interested in politics, younger than average, often self-employed, of low to average education, exasperated by the behaviour of the national parties and desirous of strong devolution if not outright autonomy for an ill-defined northern Italy.11
A much smaller, but still socially significant victor was a new political grouping called ‘La Rete’ (the Network), led by the former mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, which gained 1.9 per cent of the votes and twelve deputies. La Rete was especially strong among highly educated youth, often of Catholic background, who were heavily involved in civil society.12 As for the extreme right, the neo-Fascists of the MSI had for the moment been unable to capitalize on the DC's discomfiture, gaining only 5.4 per cent of the vote compared to 5.9 per cent in 1987.13
The percentage shifts in the 1992 elections may seem relatively small to non-Italian eyes, but there can be little doubt that these were the most significant elections in Italy since 1948. The Corriere della Sera, immediately after the event, called them ‘Earthquake elections’, as did La Stampa. Electoral instability was higher than at any time since 1953, with nearly a third of the voters declaring after the poll that they had changed their minds with respect to previous elections.14 The number of non-voters had increased to 17.4 per cent, a new record for Italy.15 All in all, the 1992 result contained all the elements of a historic protest vote, not yet for anything or anybody very specific, but quite clearly against the old ruling parties and their leaders.
In the aftermath of the vote, the politicians met to consider their next moves. The four parties which had formed the basis of Giulio Andreotti's last government (DC, PSI, PSDI, PL) still had a technical majority of sixteen seats in the lower house, but of only one in the upper. Apart from finding a majority in parliament, they had two other difficult, but not insoluble problems. Who was to be the next President of the Council of Ministers and who the next President of the Republic? Francesco Cossiga had resigned on 25 April 1992, just one month before the end of his turbulent mandate. Giulio Andreotti or Arnaldo Forlani were the most likely candidates to succeed him, but Bettino Craxi had not exactly hidden his ambitions to become the next resident at the Quirinale – it was, after all, the Socialists' turn. Failing that, he would return to Palazzo Chigi. Craxi, Andreotti, Forlani; these were once again the familiar names in the political ring in the spring of 1992, and it seemed as if the vote of 5 April might perhaps be digested painlessly after all.
However, Rome could no longer reckon without Milan, nor the politicians without the magistrates.
The arrest of Mario Chiesa turned out not to be an isolated act, but the opening of a great campaign for legality in public life, directed and coordinated with extraordinary ability and tenacity by the chief prosecutor of Milan, Francesco Saverio Borrelli. A shy and reserved figure, but of steely determination, very much a Milanese bourgeois, enamoured of classical music and of horse-riding, Borrelli was sixty-two years old in 1992, and had become chief prosecutor in Milan four years earlier. He came from a family of magistrates, and like Giovanni Falcone had been deeply steeped in a culture of service to the state.16 In 1993 Borrelli explained to the journalist Maria Antonietta Calabrò that those who enforced the law could not delude themselves that they were either above politics or free from them. Instead, they had to fight a dual battle: against their own prejudices, and against mere subservience to the politicians: ‘It is important to be aware that a neutral interpretation of the law, a mechanical one, cannot exist. Such an awareness serves to guard oneself against the danger of being the unconscious instrument of prejudices and preconceptions… It's quite a subtle game, of trying to get the right dialectical equilibrium.’17 The question of equilibrium was indeed a delicate one, and more than once, embroiled in the gargantuan and unequal battle to clean up Italian public life, it proved impossible for Borrelli and his associates to maintain the correct balance.
As the scandal of ‘Tangentopoli’ developed, Borrelli formed a pool of magistrates, or ‘Dipartimento’ as it was officially called, dedicated entirely to exploring the innumerable highways and byways of corruption in public life in Milan. The principal members of this pool, which was destined to become even more famous than that which had operated in Palermo in the 1980s, were the assistant chief prosecutor Gerardo D'Ambrosio, and the junior prosecutors Gherardo Colombo, Piercamillo Davigo and Antonio Di Pietro. The pool was a heterogeneous group, both in social origin and in political belief. Colombo, whom we have already encountered as an undaunted and upright magistrate during the inquiries into the history of the Masonic lodge P2,18 was an urban intellectual, very much part of that critical middle class to which I have made constant reference. Di Pietro, on the other hand, was of peasant stock from the region of Molise, an ex-policeman who had studied at night to become a magistrate. D'Ambrosio and Colombo were left-wingers, Davigo and Di Pietro on the right.19 Borrelli forged them into a formidable team, and took pleasure in using equine imagery to describe the way he kept them under control: ‘Sometimes I have left the reins quite loose on the necks of the most vivacious of my horses… I gave Di Pietro his head, and he did not let me down.’20
Both Borrelli and Colombo did not hesitate to pay tributes at an early stage to the outstanding qualities of Antonio Di Pietro as a magistrate. Not only was his mastery of information technology absolutely essential to an inquiry of this sort (into corruption in public life), but he demonstrated a great sense of pragmatism and considerable interrogatory skills. Colombo wrote: ‘I believe that Di Pietro's greatest ability is his way of interrogating people. It consists not just in knowing which questions to ask, and of establishing a logical sequence which “forces” the person being interrogated to give honest answers, but also in his intuitive capacity, his way of foreseeing the answers, his theatrical touches which cannot help but involve one.’21 And Borrelli spoke of his ‘overwhelming humanity, that way of involving all those who come into contact with him, of convincing them to unburden themselves, to collaborate’.22
The Milan pool soon found themselves faced with an almost uncontrollable amount of information. Not only did Mario Chiesa start to collaborate from his cell at the San Vittore prison, but many other figures from the world of Milanese business and the professions began to recount the details of the kickback system. The magistrates' information on the circles of corruption grew ever more detailed, involving increasingly important names in the political hierarchy of the city and the country. Borrelli did not hesitate to place them under investigation. If ever there was a moment to expose the corruption of the political system, this was it. The victory of the Northern League had greatly weakened the ruling parties in Milan and Lombardy, and it granted the magistrates the political room for manoeuvre that they desperately needed. From now on, they could no longer be muzzled, as had happened in the 1980s.
Under the stipulation of the new Code for Penal Procedure, which had been introduced in October 1989, as soon as the activities of a person came formally under investigation he or she had to be informed of the fact by the magistrates.23 The ‘Notice of Guarantee’, as it came to be called, was intended to safeguard the rights of the citizen, but in the heated atmosphere of the ‘Tangentopoli’ inquiry it became an act of accusation in its own right. On 1 May 1992, twenty-five days after the general elections, two such Notices of Guarantee were delivered to Paolo Pillitteri, Craxi's brother-in-law and the mayor of Milan from 1986 until January 1992, and Carlo Tognoli, another former Socialist mayor of the city and minister during the last Andreotti government. Pillitteri was being investigated for receiving and corruption to the tune of nearly one billion lire, Tognoli of the receiving of some 500 million lire in the period 1984–5.24 Then on 12 May, just twenty-four hours before the beginning of balloting by the members of parliament for the new President of the Republic, the national administrative secretary of the DC, Severino Citaristi, received the first of his many Notices, informing him that he was under investigation for illegal financing of his party.25
In the electric atmosphere created by this news, the members of parliament gathered at Montecitorio. The journalists Bellu and Bonsanti have described the scene: ‘Today, Wednesday 13 May [1992], with the two houses of parliament sitting in solemn session, the twin tracks of Tangentopoli and of the election of the new President of the Republic are truly running very close to each other. So close, in fact, as to elide and intertwine, creating such a clash that the Speaker has difficulty in maintaining a semblance of order. The cry of “thieves, thieves” rises from the benches of the MSI, is taken up by the League, and thanks to the proceedings being televised live, finishes in the homes of every Italian family.’26
The following days were to be crucial for the destiny of the Italian crisis. The Old Guard knew that if they kept their nerve they could still elect one of their number as President of the Republic, and that the Quirinale was a key position from which to manage the crisis and reassert control over the magistrates. The Christian Democrats chose Forlani as their front runner. Craxi reluctantly agreed, and announced before the vote that there was a 90 per cent chance that the secretary of the DC would gain the necessary backing. On 16 May there were two secret ballots, with the quorum for election being 508 votes. On the first ballot Forlani gained only 469 votes, on the second 479. The day after, a Sunday, he withdrew his candidacy: there had been too many desertions, either from the ranks of his own party or those of its supposed allies.27
It was now the Socialists' turn. Craxi himself was ruled out – the developments in Milan had already begun to cast their long shadow over him, and he knew that he would never reach the necessary quorum. He put forward instead Giuliano Vassalli, former Socialist minister of Justice, no friend of the independent-minded magistrates of Milan. He came much less close than Forlani, gaining just 351 votes on 22 May 1992.
The war of attrition seemed destined to go on for some time. There was a long tradition in Italian politics of repeated balloting in the election of the President of the Republic, and sooner or later it seemed likely that the ‘CAF’ would persuade parliament, more from exhaustion than conviction, to elect a candidate of their choice. Giulio Andreotti, in any case, was quietly waiting his turn in the wings. However, at this point the play of contingency reached its highest level of intensity. The focus of attention once again suddenly shifted city and subject, and the multi-faceted and complex nature of the Italian crisis revealed its most terrible side.
On 19 May Giovanni Falcone, who was still working at the Ministry of Justice,28 gave an interview to the newspaper la Repubblica. He told the journalist Giovanni Marino: ‘The enemy is always there, ready to strike. But we are not even able to agree on the election of the President of the Republic… Cosa Nostra commits crimes uninterruptedly, while we continue to quarrel without interruption.’29
Four days later, on Saturday, 23 May 1992, he flew to Palermo for the weekend, accompanied by his wife, Francesca Morvillo, who was also a magistrate. At the airport he was met by a bodyguard of seven men and three police cars. One car went ahead. Falcone himself, against the rules, took the wheel of the second, with his wife beside him, and the third car followed behind. The motorcade turned on to the autostrada heading for Palermo. The Mafia was waiting for them. At Capaci, just a few kilometres from the airport, Totò Riina's men, led by Giovanni Brusca, had placed more than 300 kilos of explosives in a large metal drainpipe that passed underneath the autostrada. As the motorcade drove past, they detonated the explosive. The three carabinieri in the lead car, Antonio Montinaro, Rocco Di Cillo and Vito Schifani, were killed instantly. Falcone and his wife died in hospital shortly afterwards. The official driver of the second car, who had been in the back seat, was badly injured but survived. The three bodyguards in the last car escaped with minor injuries.30
The ‘massacre at Capaci’, an event which for a moment focused the attention of the whole world upon the Italian crisis, was part of that general strategy of revenge killings by the Mafia for the ‘maxiprocesso’ of Palermo, for the life sentences to which the Mafia bosses had been sentenced at its conclusion, and for the confirmation of those sentences pronounced by the Corte di Cassazione on 31 January 1992.31 It was not a declaration of war, for that had already been declared many years previously, but a spectacular demonstration of the surveillance skills and firepower of the Mafia in that war. The Mafia leaders had carefully tracked one of the most carefully guarded men in Italy, the very symbol of the anti-Mafia struggle, caught him in a relatively unguarded moment and blown him up. In so doing, they hoped to have demonstrated both their own invincibility and the ineluctable fate that awaited all those servants of the state who stood in their way.
The reactions of the highest echelons of the state were once again, as after the killing of General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa in August 1982, of the knee-jerk variety. Having quarrelled and voted for days on end over who was to be the next President of the Republic, the shock wave of Falcone's death forced the joint session of the houses of parliament into precipitate action. If two weeks earlier it had been the Milanese aspect of the crisis that had rudely disturbed the rituals of Roman politics, now it was the tragedy outside Palermo that dictated the course of the crisis. On 25 May 1992 Christian Democrats, Socialists, Liberals, Social Democrats, the PDS, the Verdi, the Rete and the Radicals reached agreement on the name of Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (at that time the newly elected President of the Chamber of Deputies) for President of the Republic. It was an agreement that would have been utterly inconceivable just two days earlier.
The choice of Scalfaro was to be of profound significance for Italian politics in the 1990s. Scalfaro both was and was not a member of the Old Guard. He certainly had all the characteristics of a traditional Christian Democrat politician, and had been Minister of the Interior during both the Craxi governments. On the other hand, he was culturally very far from those ‘business politicians’ who had so marked the 1980s, and he was respectful of the autonomy of the magistracy. In his speech to the Chamber of Deputies of 28 May 1992, he had made his position clear on a number of issues, among which was Tangentopoli’: ‘The misuse of public money is a very serious misdemeanour; it robs and defrauds the honest citizen who pays his taxes, and undermines severely the faith of citizens in the state: there is no greater evil, no greater danger for democracy than the torbid interlacing of business and politics.’32 The ‘CAF’ had not exactly got the man they wanted.
The election of the President of the Republic had been one immediate result of the killing of Falcone, his wife and his bodyguards. Another, of equal if not greater significance, was the reaction of some sections of the population of Palermo. Some 40,000 people attended the funeral in the cathedral of Palermo of the victims of the massacre at Capaci, whereas less than a year earlier, in August 1991, the family of Libero Grassi, the businessman who had dared to stand up to the Mafia, had been left almost alone to mourn him.33 But it was not numbers that mattered so much as attitudes. The very cruelty and desperation of the conflict in Sicily seemed to provoke a reaction in which there was a noble attempt to connect family attitudes, civil society and the responsibilities of the state. In other words the linkages between these three spheres, which in much of the rest of the peninsula were to remain all too weak and undefined throughout the crisis, here emerged in an intense and admirable, albeit fleeting, form. Perhaps no document illustrates this better than the section ‘The pledge’, pronounced on 13 June 1992 during the prayer vigil in the packed Palermitan church of S. Giuseppe ai Teatini:
We pledge to educate our children to respect others, to have a sense of duty and a sense of justice.
We pledge not to turn a blind eye to current malpractices, lending them tacit consent simply because ‘così fan tutti’.
We pledge to renounce any privileges which could derive from contacts and help of a clientelistic or ‘mafioso’ type.
We pledge to recognize justice for all as being a value superior to our own particular interest.
We pledge to not ask as a favour that which is due to us as a right…
We pledge not to forget Giovanni Falcone and all those who have died in the fight against the Mafia, and to remember them as if they were members of our own families who had died for us.34
Here, expressed in an extremely simple and direct fashion, was a code of conduct that addressed not only the problem of the individual and the Mafia, but also indicated the via maestra by which the family could become that ‘real school of the virtues of freedom’ to which John Stuart Mill had referred.35 Here, too, was a completely different reading from the habitual one of the relationship between the citizen and the public administration.
The civil society that grew in Palermo and other parts of Sicily in these weeks, and which was unique in the history of the island, was one that had its roots in the ‘Palermo Spring’ of 1985–6. It was primarily middle-class,36 a complex mixture of grass-roots Catholic activism, of ex-militants of the PCI and of the revolutionary groups of the 1970s, of feminists, of university and school students, of trade-unionists. It had all the virtues and the defects of a ‘rainbow alliance’ (the expression is Jessie Jackson's), all the vigour and passion and pluralism of a movement born from below, all the difficulties in making such a movement cohere and endure.
One of its most original and visually dramatic expressions was the draping, out of windows and over balconies, of old sheets on which had been sprayed a variety of slogans: ‘Palermo has understood, but has the state?’ ‘I know, but I don't have the proof,’ ‘Falcone, you continue to live in our hearts,’ ‘Palermo wants to live.’37 The idea had first come to a kinship group of three sisters and their daughters the night after the assassination of Falcone. A ‘Sheets’ ‘committee’ was formed,38 and rapidly more and more slogans appeared, in schools as well as homes, in the historic city centre and in some of the suburbs.
The symbolic action of these months took many forms. The historian Giovanna Fiume has described just two of them. The first reinvented and modified an old trade-union tradition, the ‘strike-in-reverse':
A group of citizens decide to reopen roadworks on the ring road of Palermo, incomplete after twenty years of work. They put up a sign which reads: ‘Civil society assessorate: cost of the work, 000,000,000 billion lire.’ A large group of volunteers sets to work weeding, moving stones, preparing verges and banks. They manage to recoup a stretch of the autostrada, and in so doing get rid of one of the bottlenecks which had meant long daily queues for motorists. Then they hand over the works to the Prefect of the city, as if to say, ‘It's your turn now.’
The second had echoes of 1968: ‘Hundreds of students from Agrigento fill the local train which is going to Racalmuto where the Mafia wars have recently been responsible for killing innocent bystanders. For an evening they take over the territory of the Mafia, with the simplicity that belongs to youth.’39
Obviously, the intensity of emotion and action of this time could not be sustained for long.40 The movement, being mainly middle-class, had barely touched the popular quarters of the city where Mafia traditions were most deeply inculcated. Class and culture divided the city, and how far civil society in Palermo could put down firm roots depended to a very great extent upon the way in which the crisis developed or died at a national level.
In Sicily, though, the Mafia had not finished its work. On 19 July, a Sunday, the magistrate Paolo Borsellino went in the late afternoon to visit his mother in Palermo, in her flat in Via D'Amelio. He was accompanied to the gate of the block of flats in which she lived by five highly armed guards, one of whom was a woman, Emanuela Loi.41 Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion which killed all six of them instantaneously and dismembered their bodies.42
With the killings in Via D'Amelio, the Republican state reached the lowest point in its long and ambiguous relationship with the Mafia. If, after the massacre at Capaci, the reaction had been one of anger, now it was one of despair. In Palermo one testimony wrote of ‘an infinite sadness, crowded together as we were on the steps of the Palace of Justice, the flowers we held in our hands wilting in the tremendous heat, the slogan on our tee-shirts, “enough is enough”, seeming to us now like a silly piece of bravado, because we were dwarfs faced by a giant who had just demonstrated that he could do anything he wanted to’.43
The widow of Borsellino refused a state funeral for her husband and the police threatened not to act in the future as bodyguards for anti-Mafia magistrates. When, on 21 July 1992, the highest political authorities of the state as well as the chief of police, Vincenzo Parisi, attended the state funeral in Palermo cathedral of the four policemen and the one policewoman killed in Via D'Amelio, they were protected with great difficulty from the anger of the crowd and from many of the police themselves.44
The state trembled, and to all Europe it seemed as if Italy was slipping rapidly out of control. The Observer wrote on 26 July 1992: ‘The country is in a state of chaos, a state of war. It is fast becoming the banana republic of Europe. It has the highest murder rate in the European Community, the most rampant and blatant corruption, an ailing economy, a floundering government, and an anguished and embarrassed population.’45
Yet Italy, including Sicily, had many hidden resources. On 23 July in Palermo ‘there were ten thousand people in the streets to demonstrate their loyalty to this State, however inept and half-dismantled that it is’.46 In Catania the young volunteers of ‘Gapa’, an anti-Mafia group typical of the new southern associationism, spent the entire summer working with the children of the popular quarter of San Cristoforo, where the Santapaola Mafia ‘Family’ ruled supreme.47 These were minority initiatives, but highly significant none the less.
Back in Rome, to continue this tale of the three cities – Milan, Rome and Palermo – in whose palaces and streets the dramatic events of 1992 were played out, the political class also demonstrated quite unexpected resources. If the problem of the Presidency of the Republic had been solved, that of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers had not. In June 1992, Bettino Craxi still hoped that his old friendship with Scalfaro and his own unceasing insistence would be rewarded with another tenure at Palazzo Chigi. Scalfaro, though, was not so sure. Too many of Craxi's closest associates were being drawn into the Milanese magistrates' net, too much evidence was accumulating which pointed directly to the Socialist leader's offices in Piazza Duomo. Scalfaro, in the first of a number of highly skilful uses of his powers as President, asked Craxi to propose another Socialist to preside over an interim government, until such time as Craxi's name would be cleared, as it surely would be. If not, he hinted, there would be no choice but to ask a Christian Democrat like Mino Martinazzoli to take over the reins of government. Neither Arnaldo Forlani nor Giuliano Vassalli, had they been elected President of the Republic, would have dreamed of insisting on such a solution. Craxi had little option but to acquiesce, and the Old Guard had lost its last possible base for a counter-attack.
On withdrawing his own candidacy, Craxi proposed the names of three leading members of his party – Giuliano Amato, who had been Treasury Minister in the late 80s, Gianni De Michelis, the Foreign Minister until April 1992, and Claudio Martelli, Vice-President of the Council of Ministers under Andreotti. Scalfaro chose Amato, which was just as well, because both De Michelis and Martelli were shortly to be the subject of more than one judicial inquiry.
Giuliano Amato was both one of the most brilliant and most enigmatic figures in Italian politics. A distinguished professor of constitutional law, he had chosen to make a political career by serving Bettino Craxi as his Under-Secretary at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers during the years 1983–7. From this vantage point at the very centre of Craxi's web of power, Amato must have witnessed the corrosive spread of Socialist malpractice and corruption. He never denounced it, though there is no evidence that he formed part of it. Quite why he chose a figure like Craxi for his political patron and master remains a mystery, one of those conundrums wherein psychology and politics intertwine.
However, once given his own command and freed, though never completely, from Craxi's shadow, Amato displayed considerable qualities of leadership and initiative. Sworn in on 28 June 1992, his was a fragile interim government, but one presided over with quiet determination.48
As well as the terrible situation in Sicily, and the unwelcome activity of the Milanese magistrates, Amato was faced immediately with an economic conjuncture which combined several different elements into a single, dangerous whole. The first warning signal concerned the budget deficit. In 1991, as we have seen, the primary deficit (net of interest rates) had returned to the black, but the budget for 1992 was widely judged to be insufficient, and the long political void between the elections at the beginning of April and Amato's appointment at the end of June had allowed Italy's chronic public accounts to slip further into debt. The predicted deficit on the current account was more than 40,000 billion lire over target. Piero Barucci, Amato's Treasury Minister and one of six ‘technical’ members of his government, described the bleak prospect that faced the new team: ‘We had to go to the G7 summit at Munich, with a completely new government… and explain why the figures for our public accounts bore so little resemblance to those which were in the most recent documents, and which could still be found on desks in Brussels and Washington.’49
One of the reasons for the Italians' discomfiture lay precisely in Germany. Faced with a weak dollar and the risk of inflation after reunification, the Germans were absolutely determined to keep interest rates high. Italy was forced to follow suit, and this meant that interest payments on her public debt were growing at great speed.50
However, the most insidious element of the economic situation was what can perhaps be best described as the great post-Maastricht depression. This had both a European as well as an Italian aspect. On 2 June 1992 a referendum in Denmark had voted against the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, and there were many signs that the French would follow suit. The euphoria that had surrounded the signing of the Treaty evaporated rapidly, and monetary union began to seem a very long way away. In the Italian case, the problems did not concern ratification,51 but implementation. The hard truth of the ‘external constraint’ began to sink in. At the time of the Maastricht agreement, Italy's inflation rate was 6.9 per cent; her budget deficit 9.9 per cent of GDP, against a requirement of 3 per cent; her public debt 103 per cent of GDP, instead of 60 per cent or less; her long-term interest rate 11.9 per cent.52 But even before the signing of the Treaty the Financial Times had published an editorial with the ominous title ‘Italy heading for relegation’.53 This footballing metaphor became a constant in the Italian press, both during 1992 and afterwards, and obviously touched a highly sensitive spot in the nation's history.
Other eyes, too, were watching the development of the Italian situation. Italy was in the narrow band of the EMS currencies, along with Britain, but in the jittery post-Maastricht climate there were increasing doubts as to whether either of their economic performances justified the rates of exchange of their currencies. The lira was losing ground against the mark, and the Bank of Italy was having to intervene constantly to support it. As Piero Barucci, himself a banker, wrote: ‘For the financial operators… the exchange rate of the lira could become a market which offered unexpected profits. The Italian currency was to be studied for its weaknesses and possible developments. Henceforward, it was destined to become a prey.’54
Amato did what he could to buy time. One week after taking office, he summoned a Council of Ministers on a Sunday morning, 5 July 1992, and announced a drastic ‘corrective measure’ to the tune of some 30,000 billion lire, to be garnered both from spending cuts and further taxation.55 He then flew off directly to Munich for the G7 meeting, where he and the other Italian representatives, even if they were not omitted from the official photograph, felt rather as if they had been. The pressure on the lira eased, but not for long.
The first weeks of Giuliano Amato's government were marked by two other events of considerable significance. The first of these was the signing on 31 July 1992 of a tripartite pact between government, employers and trade unions. As we have seen above,56 in the 1980s the trade unions had lost their way as a major social and political protagonist. They had also quarrelled bitterly over Craxi's decision in 1984 to reduce the weight of the wage index mechanism, the so-called ‘scala mobile’. Eight years later, they had refound some sort of unity of action, and much of the merit for this belonged to the veteran leader of the CGIL, Bruno Trentin, who had convinced his union of the need to work closely with the CISL and UIL, and to establish a higher national political profile.57
As for the Confindustria, it too had made progress. For the first time in more than twenty years, as Liborio Mattina has shown, it had formulated a clear political strategy, in which it called for a radical overhaul of the public administration and of the relationship between the citizen and public services, immediate privatizations, reduction of the public debt, and institutional and fiscal reform.58 Under the able leadership of a young Roman businessman, Luigi Abete, Confindustria seemed much more oriented to being a political actor than a mere lobby. It also, rather late in the day, established a code of practice, to which its members were asked to adhere.59
The preconditions for an agreement were thus established, and in the electric atmosphere of July 1992, Amato coaxed the two sides together and pleaded with them to move swiftly. In particular he asked Bruno Trentin to make considerable sacrifices, to abandon the ‘scala mobile’ and reach a general agreement with the employers over labour costs. Only in this way, argued both Amato and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, could the inflationary spiral of wages and prices be broken, and the interests of the nation be preserved.
This was not the first time in the history of the Republic that Italy's largest and most left-wing trade union had been asked to sacrifice class interests for national ones, nor the first time that it had responded positively.60 Trentin hesitated at length before signing, because he knew how unpopular the abandonment of the ‘scala mobile’, the cherished safeguard of the real value of workers’ wages, would be at the grass-roots. He also felt, justly, that Amato was not a real arbiter, but was much closer to the positions of the Confindustria than to those of the majority of the CGIL.61
The agreement of 31 July 1992, which led to great conflict in the CGIL, and which was widely interpreted by its base as a major defeat, came to be recognized, with the passage of time, as of historic importance. Not only was it an important international signal at a moment of considerable national crisis; it was also the start of a new political role for the unions themselves, in which consensual compromise between government, employers and trade unions became the very basis of governance.62
The other crucial decision of these weeks, very different in kind, was to send some 7,000 troops to Sicily in the wake of the killing of Paolo Borsellino and his bodyguard. The problem of the Mafia was not going to be solved by the army, but its presence in Palermo was of crucial psychological importance, and was recognized as such by those who were in the front line of the fight against the Mafia.63 On 6 September Giuseppe Madonia, a leading member of the Mafia, was arrested. Five days later it was the turn of Carmine Alfieri, considered to be the head of the Neapolitan Camorra. At long last, it looked as if the state meant business, and not Mafia business.
While the government tried to come to terms with the grave problems of the economy and the Mafia, that other multiplicator of crisis, judicial activity in Milan, continued its work inexorably, attracting as it did so increasing international interest.64 On 16 July Salvatore Ligresti, the leading building constructor of the city, was arrested. As Bellu and Bonsanti wrote, ‘It's an epoch-making occurrence for Milan, a sort of taking of the Bastille. Ligresti is the backroom partner of all the principal economic dynasties of the Nation.’65 His arrest also signalled the magistrates’ conviction that corruption did not flow in one direction only, from the politicians to the world of business, but also vice versa.66
However, very quickly the word ‘Tangentopoli became dissociated from its territorial definition of the city of Milan, and assumed a vaguer, more displaced connotation.67 Taking courage from their Milanese colleagues' example, magistrates all over the country began to investigate those accusations of corruption in public life which they had previously ignored quietly. One of the most startling early cases concerned a PSDI assessore of the Comune of Rome, Lamberto Mancini, who was arrested on 10 June while receiving a kickback of 28 million lire. In itself the event was hardly by this time very noteworthy. That same morning, though, Mancini had laid a wreath on the monument to Giacomo Matteotti, whose assassination at the hands of a Fascist squad had taken place exactly seventy years earlier. Mancini had then issued a press statement specifying that his was ‘a non-ritualistic homage, but one of deep respect for a man who had fought to the death against that culture of illegality which is so present even in our time’.68
From Reggio Calabria, where the revelations of the ex-mayor Agatino Licandro69 led to the arrest of the leading private building constructor, Vincenzo Lodigiani, to Verona, where the Christian Democrat leadership was to be decapitated,70 a wave of judicial activity swept through the peninsula during the following months. On 14 July 1992, Gianni De Michelis, the former Socialist Minister for Foreign Affairs and one of the Italian signatories of the Maastricht Treaty, was placed under investigation by the Venetian magistrates.71
For Bettino Craxi the situation was becoming quite intolerable. In a speech of 3 July to the House of Deputies he abandoned his earlier, moralizing stance, and claimed that the illegal financing of the parties was well known to be part of the Italian political system, and should be accepted as such. When this line failed to convince, he tried in August to organize a personal counter-attack against the most renowned of the Milanese prosecuting magistrates, Antonio Di Pietro. After a meeting of the Socialist leadership of 26 August, Rino Formica, the former Socialist Minister of Finances, announced, in one of the historic phrases of this period, that ‘Bettino has three aces up his sleeve’ which would discredit totally Di Pietro.72 Nothing, at least for the moment, came of this menace, and the magistrates’ investigations went on.
One of the principal reasons why they did so lay with the enthusiastic support that public opinion accorded them. Slogans like ‘Thank you Di Pietro,’ ‘All power to Colombo,’ ‘Di Pietro, you're better than Pelé,’ appeared on the walls and monuments of Milan.73 There was widespread excitement at the prospect of some of the most arrogant figures in Italy, who had long regarded themselves as untouchable, at last being called upon to respond for their actions. A festive air pervaded many parts of Italy, as always happens when the habitual ordering of a society is suddenly brought into question.
It is possible to suggest that behind this seeming unanimity of public opinion there lay many and divergent motivations, which in turn reflected differences of class and of culture. Dependent workers of left-wing traditions rejoiced in the discomfiture of their historic opponents. The self-employed and small entrepreneurs gave vent to their pent-up fury with a political class which was taxing them increasingly at a time of recession, but which offered in return a deeply inefficient public administration. All those who had voted for the Northern League added what was for them a self-evident geographical interpretation: these were the thieves of Rome and their emissaries who were being accused and arrested. Finally, some of the educated middle classes, those who were most active in civil society, rejoiced in the forcible reaffirmation of legality and of public ethics. The convergence of interests and passions was thus a strong one, but unlikely to last.
With so many voices raised in unison, dangers of summary justice and of the infringement of civil liberties hung heavy in the air. The new Code of Penal Procedure had aimed at increasing the rights of defendants, and at destroying the old ‘inquisitory’ character of the Public Prosecutor. It certainly did not function in that way in the heated atmosphere of 1992–3. The ‘informazione di garanzia’, the Notice which informed a person that he or she was under investigation, functioned, as has been seen, as a sort of pre-emptive sentence. Defendants felt strongly that they had insufficient possibilities to exercise their rights of defence. The judges who had to decide on the preliminary validity of the Public Prosecutor's case were often insufficiently independent from the Prosecutor's office. Preventive imprisonment, or the threat of it, was widely used as an instrument of pressure in order to extract confession.74 Extracts from interrogations had an uncanny habit of being reprinted in newspapers and weeklies. Some magistrates, in their eagerness to take action, made unpardonable errors.75
Once again, as with the question of the probity of the evidence of ‘pentiti’, so with ‘Tangentopoli’, the debate centred around means and ends in the legal system. In 1992–3 a minority of Italian magistrates, led by those in Milan, tried to break the vicious circle of corruption in public life. Sometimes they used methods that were questionable. Sometimes they made mistakes. Nearly always their actions led to personal tragedy of a greater or lesser kind.76 None the less, it is difficult to conclude, in overall terms, that they acted in bad faith, or to deny the impelling and important contribution they made to Italian democracy.
In the autumn of 1992, the three great cities of the Italian crisis, Milan, Rome and Palermo, were joined by two others which were ‘virtual’, but not for this reason any less real. One, as we have just seen, was a by now omni-present ‘Tangentopoli’. The other was the ‘City’, not in the narrow territorial sense of the one square mile in the heart of London, but a place of frenzy and of information technology inhabited by financial operators on a global scale. In the 1980s, this last city had grown correspondingly with the great transformations of the global money markets.77 In 1992 its interest in Europe was twofold: the liberalization of flows of capital in the context of the European Single Market had improved the conditions as well as the volume of trade; and the post-Maastricht uncertainties had rendered exchange rates volatile, with the corresponding possibility of realizing significant profits. The power of this City, the way it combined iron market logic and manifest unpredictability, rendered it an awesome force. Rarely, as in the sequence of events that follows, is it so easy to discern the predominance of economic structures, and the flailing attempts of single human agents, however powerful, to combat them.
The lira, as we have just seen, had become a particular object of attention for the financial operators in the early summer of 1992. It was certainly not the only currency to attract such scrutiny, for both the French franc and sterling were under pressure, though for different reasons (if such they can be called).78 The very stability of the European Monetary System, which had not been substantially modified in nearly six years, was being called into question. The time had come for a rapid realignment of the national currencies, before the situation got out of control.
At a secret meeting held in the Ministry of Finances in Paris on 26 August 1992, between the four European powers which were members of the G7, and at the subsequent wider reunion of EC finance ministers and Governors of national banks at Bath on 4–5 September, no agreement was reached on what should be done. Both occasions were an object lesson in the primacy of national self-interest at a time of European crisis.79 The Germans refused to budge an inch on interest rates, given their fear of inflation. The French would not contemplate a realignment because of the negative consequences it could have on their delicately balanced referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, due on 20 September. The Italians knew that they could not avoid devaluation, but hoped that they would not be left by themselves. The British, the most obvious candidates to join them, would not even begin to contemplate such a move. Instead at Bath the blustering Norman Lamont, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, repeatedly and ineffectually tried to berate Helmut Schlesinger, President of the Bundesbank, into reducing his country's interest rates.80
The economic representatives of the most powerful European nations therefore offered rather less than a coherent or united reaction, but in any case it must remain doubtful whether they could have saved the EMS from the menace incumbent upon it. In the week beginning Monday, 7 September 1992, there was an extraordinary speculative run against the lira. The Bundesbank, following the rules that had been agreed by the EC for such emergencies, intervened massively in support of the Italian currency. By Friday 11 September it had had enough. It had bought up some 24 billion Deutschmarks’ worth of lira, and feared that these obligatory purchases would swamp its capacity to control Germany's fast-expanding money supply. Theo Waigel, the long-serving German Finance Minister, phoned Piero Barucci and said that the Bundesbank would not continue. The lira would have to devalue, hopefully not by itself.81
The Germans and Italians agreed therefore that the lira would devalue by 7 per cent, with the Germans reducing their interest rates very slightly. On 11 September, Giuliano Amato phoned John Major, the British Prime Minister, who was staying with the Queen at Balmoral, and asked him if Britain would consider a joint, damage-limiting initiative. The answer was a firm ‘no’. The British government was content to leave Italy to go it alone.
Three days later, though, it was sterling's turn. As the Financial Times explained laconically: ‘There was enough dissonance among policy makers to encourage fund managers and corporate treasurers to take a further shot at the ERM.’82 On 16 September 1992, Black Wednesday, the rate of exchange of both the sterling and the lira plummeted dramatically, and both were forced not just to devalue, but to exit from the European monetary system.
The devaluation of a national currency is nearly always considered a national humiliation, and Black Wednesday was no exception, either for Italy or for Britain. In both countries the situation was made worse by the way it was handled. Amato had gone on television to present the deal with the Germans in reassuring and rational tones, almost as a triumph of Italian diplomacy, but he was immediately belied by events as the lira plummeted further downwards.83 The British leaders, though, had been far more irresponsible, for they had behaved with considerable arrogance, convinced that there was no need for a European response, and that sterling could look after itself.84
Apart from wounded national pride, the greatest casualty was the spirit of Maastricht. On 20 September the French approved the Treaty by a very narrow margin, but the plans for economic and monetary union by the end of the decade had received a very severe blow. Not only was the EMS in tatters (the Spanish peseta and the Portuguese escudo were also to devalue in November), but the Germans had learned some very specific Darwinian lessons. From this time onwards they theorized a two-tier Europe; only the economically reliable nations would be allowed to join them, at least in the first instance, on the path to monetary union. And Italy? One senior European monetary official commented some months after the September débâcle: ‘If you looked at all the indicators, there was one group of countries (the original members minus Italy) which stayed close to each other and another group (the newcomers with Italy) that was diverging significantly in a lasting way.’85 The writing was on the wall, and the grand Italian strategy of the ‘vincolo esterno’ lay in ruins.
In the aftermath of the September débâcle in Europe, the Italian state once again, as in the previous July, had to endure moments of panic and discomfort. The monthly auction of state bonds (BOT) in late September had a low take-up, and the Bank of Italy had to buy heavily in order to sustain public confidence. Many people began to withdraw money from their bank accounts, and this practice extended, as the Treasury Minister noted with horror, even to the bank inside the Senate, where one afternoon he came across a queue of people waiting to withdraw their deposits.86
In spite of calls on Amato to resign, his government lasted another six months, and in that time it passed many useful measures, as well as many controversial ones. Immediately after what had become a free-floating devaluation, which settled the lira at around 15 per cent less than its previous value, Amato pushed very hard for budgetary reform. In the annual budget for 1993 he and Barucci proposed spending cuts and tax increases which amounted to more than 93,000 billion lire, the largest single financial intervention in the whole period under consideration. The budget, together with other measures passed by decree laws, slashed state spending in health, social insurance and other areas. As for income, new taxes were introduced on house ownership and a special ‘minimum tax’ for the self-employed.
After what had happened in September, there can be no doubt at all that radical steps were needed to bring the budget deficit, and if possible the public debt, under control. Amato, therefore, responded to a state of necessity. As he commented bitterly to Ciampi on 16 September 1992: ‘As you can see, my dear Governor, in Italy it is only possible to take remedial measures once the roof over our heads has already fallen in.’87
However, his actions were highly problematic, for two principal orders of reasoning. The first was a European one. Italy was not alone, after the shocks of September, in applying a drastic programme of budget squeezing. To varying degrees, nearly all her neighbours were engaged in the same sort of operation. Such widespread action could lead only in one direction: recession. In fact, 1993 was to be a dismal year, and in Italy consumption fell for the first time in the whole of the post-war period, by 2.5 per cent. GDP, too, declined, by 1.2 per cent, which did nothing to help the public debt.88
The second reason was a domestic one. In a time of national crisis of this sort, Giuliano Amato, for all his determination and intelligence, was not the right person to be the President of the Council of Ministers. In the past he had been too close to Craxi, and in the present he was seen by left-wing forces in the trade unions and in society as being too biased towards the employers. As long as Amato was at the helm, they were unlikely to agree to economic sacrifice.
The autumn of 1992, therefore, saw a significant resurgence of a very strong tradition in Italian public culture, that of working-class protest. In spite of all the structural changes in the world of work during the 1980s, which I have attempted to analyse in Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume, the capacity for mobilization and its habitual forms had not disappeared. In September 1992 the piazze were full of dependent workers of one sort or another, protesting against the cuts, against the government and against their own trade-union leaders, who had signed the pact on labour costs. On 29 October, a strike called not by the trade-union leadership but by 100 factory councils brought 50,000 workers on to the streets of Milan.89 By February 1993, Bruno Trentin, the leader of the CGIL, was denouncing the social policies of Amato's government as ‘tragic’ and its plans to boost employment as ‘a disgrace’.90
None the less, Amato battled on, and was able to chalk up a number of important initiatives in the crucial area of the reform of the state. Nearly all of these measures corresponded to that entrepreneurial approach which has been outlined above, and which sought to introduce into the public administration the productivity, efficiency and culture of the private firm.91 Thus the first steps were taken towards privatizing the public sector giants IRI, ENI, INA and ENEL by transforming them into shareholding companies, and attempts were made to improve the health service by rationalizing the number of USLs (Local Health Authorities) and raising their productivity.
However, probably the most important of Amato's initiatives was the decree law on the reform of the public administration, announced on 22 January 1993. The contracts of all public employees were henceforth to be based on private administrative law. They were to be treated as private employees, without special job security, and were to be rewarded for productivity, rendered flexible, and sacked if necessary. Hours of opening to the public were to be extended to the afternoons. Public sector managers were to be given wider responsibilities and constant targets. The effective power of veto of the trade unions was to be drastically reduced. New Public Management had arrived in Italy. The editorial of the business newspaper Il Sole – 24 Ore of 23 January celebrated the changes with a familiar metaphor: ‘In the great family of the public administration, home to all manner of irresponsibility, the concept of the co-relation between work and performance has been introduced for the first time. Something which was perfectly obvious to those accustomed to work in the private sphere.’92
As for institutional reform, very much less progress was made. Another bicameral commission, similar to that presided over by Aldo Bozzi in 1983–5, met and deliberated for a number of months under the presidency first of Ciriaco De Mita and then of Nilde Jotti. It did not manage to agree on very much. In this field Italy suffered from the conundrum ably identified by Gustavo Zagrebelsky: a constitutional reform is necessary when a political system works badly, but when a political system works badly, it will not be able to produce a reform.93 Italy's political class also suffered from what appeared, at least from the outside, to be an obsessive concentration upon the possible merits and niceties of different electoral systems. The amount of energy and time dedicated to this argument was, obviously, at the expense of others, of equal or possibly greater importance.
However, one highly significant change did emerge from parliament just before the end of the Amato government: the new law on the election of city mayors, agreed on 25 March 1992. Passed in order to avoid a referendum on the issue, the law gave voters the right to elect their mayor directly. This provision was to have a significant effect, for the better, on the relationship between voting and political responsibility at a local level.
Finally, mention must be made of continuing developments at Palermo, developments which were not directly the responsibility of the government, but which occurred within its period of office. On 15 January 1993 a special unit of the Carabinieri, coordinated by the magistrate Ilda Boccassini, succeeded where all others had failed: it arrested the leader of the Sicilian Mafia, Totò Riina. The Carabinieri had been tipped off by Baldassare Di Maggio, a Mafia ‘pentito’ whose life had been threatened by Riina and Giovanni Brusca.94
In this same period a new Chief Prosecutor, Gian Carlo Caselli, arrived to replace Pietro Giammanco, who had stepped down after Borsellino's killing. Like Caponnetto before him, Caselli had volunteered for the job. Piedmontese, left-wing, of working-class background, and devoutly Catholic, Caselli told the journalist Maria Antonietta Calabrò of the way in which he viewed his appointment:
In my interview of November 1992 with the Higher Council of the Judiciary, I had made it clear that if I was to go to Palermo I would do so, subjectively, in a spirit of deep humility, aware of how much I would have to learn… I also added a remark which might appear presumptuous, but which the Council appreciated: I said that to be an external observer of a situation like that of Palermo perhaps offered certain advantages, because in Palermo there are many ‘internal’ constraints, often unconscious ones… which are the result of practices and mechanisms which overlap with each other and have rigidified over time. It is for this reason that I was chosen for the job in Sicily.95
He was to prove a remarkable Chief Prosecutor, quite the most courageous and dedicated public servant in the Europe of his time.
Giuliano Amato had served his country well as Prime Minister, but it was the problem of justice, that torment of the whole political class, old and new, for all of the 1990s, that was to be his undoing. His government was already a frail one in political terms, but its composition was undermined continuously by the activities of magistrates in various parts of the country. Seven of his ministers were forced to resign during the few, but crucial, months that he held power. On 15 December 1992 his former mentor, Bettino Craxi, received the first of a series of Notices of Guarantee from the Procura di Milano, informing him that he was under investigation for corruption, receiving, and violation of the law on the public financing of political parties. Craxi defended himself by claiming that the accusations against him were all part of a political plot, a claim that was to be a constant among those accused. However, the charges against him grew ever more substantial, and in May 1994 he decided to flee the country for his villa at Hammamet in Tunisia. His most likely successor as leader of the Socialists, Claudio Martelli, who had already begun to contest Craxi's leadership, had to resign as minister of Justice when fresh revelations linked his name to an old story – that of the P2 and of the 7 million dollars which the banker Roberto Calvi had deposited in a Lugano bank account in the name of ‘the Honourable Claudio Martelli on behalf of the Honourable Bettino Craxi’.96 There seemed no end to what would be discovered or to the assault of the magistrates on the old political order. Indeed, it made a certain impression upon British readers at this time to see on the front page of the weekend supplement of the Financial Times a huge drawing of the Tower of Pisa depicted as a can of worms, with an accompanying article by Robert Graham entitled ‘When honesty means sharing your bribes’.97
An end, though, was attempted. After a marathon meeting of the Council of Ministers on 5 April 1993, Giuliano Amato and Giovanni Conso, his new minister of Justice, announced the passing of four decree laws and the proposing of three bills for what was to be termed a ‘political solution’ to the crisis.98 The most politically significant of these measures was immediate depenalization for the illicit financing of political parties, which was the most common and least serious of the crimes of ‘Tangentopoli’.99
However, Amato and Conso had badly misjudged the situation. Public opinion was outraged at the prospect of what came to be called ‘throwing in the sponge’, and at the idea that the political class would proceed to acquit itself. That weekend, especially on Sunday, 7 March 1993, the newspapers were inundated with faxed messages of protest, the telephone exchange at the Quirinale was blocked by incoming calls, there were spontaneous meetings and assemblies in many cities. The voice of a certain civil society was making itself heard.100
On the same Sunday morning Eugenio Scalfari published a dramatic editorial in la Repubblica, accusing Amato and Conso of lying to the public.101 In historical terms, his editorial constituted probably the single most important piece published by the newspaper during its long, constant and influential campaign in support of the magistrates of ‘Tangentopoli’. Later on the same day the President of the Republic let it be known that, on exclusively constitutional grounds, he was not prepared to sign the decree law which removed the penalties for the illegal financing of the parties. Scalfaro called his a constitutional decision, but it was in reality a key political move.
Amato's government never recovered from this defeat. The magistrates took new heart and made further, clamorous decisions. On 28 March 1993 Giulio Andreotti received a Notice of Guarantee from the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo notifying him that he was under investigation for the crime of association with the Mafia.102 The day after, the Neapolitan magistrates informed Antonio Gava, the former minister of the Interior, that he too was under investigation, for his links with the Camorra. In these weeks, as the jurist Guido Neppi Modona wrote: ‘The incisiveness of the magistrates’ judicial inquiries into the corrupt links between business and politics, and into the collusion between Mafia and politicians, gave the sensation that a thorough-going revolution was taking place, conducted by means of the legal instruments of the penal process.'103
On 18–19 April 1993 a series of referenda, which had again been promoted principally by Mario Segni, was passed with overwhelming support.104 Seventy-five per cent of the electorate voted, and of these 82.7 per cent cast their ballots for change. The most significant referendum was that abrogating the electoral system in the Senate, a decision which obliged parliament to confront rather than to avoid the question of overall electoral reform. It was time for Amato to go. He had always opposed the path of constitutional reform by referendum, but in any case the country by this time needed a more clearly impartial President of the Council of Ministers.
With the party system in absolute disarray, the road was open for Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to form a ‘President's government’.105 He chose as its head Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Governor of the Bank of Italy since 1979. Ciampi was born in 1920 at Leghorn; he had been a youthful partisan in the ranks of the Action Party, and was a widely respected figure, both in Italy and in Europe. At the time of the devaluation of the lira, he had wanted to resign, but had been persuaded to remain at his post;106 just a few months later, at the age of seventy-three, he found himself as President of the Council of Ministers. With his arrival at Palazzo Chigi the tendency for the Italian ‘core executive’ to be dominated by non-political experts, a process already under way in the last Andreotti governments and in that of Amato, reached its apogee. Ciampi represented the very best of that particular culture enshrined in the Bank of Italy.107 His economic expertise was invaluable at this time, but so too was his sense of social justice.
Both Scalfaro and Ciampi had wanted to include representatives of the opposition in this transitional government, and indeed in its original composition three technical experts from the PDS became ministers;108 in addition, the Green Francesco Rutelli took over responsibility for the Environment. However, on 29 April 1993, the day after Ciampi had presented his list of ministers, the House of Deputies voted against all four requests by the Procura of Milan to proceed against Bettino Craxi (the House would have had to lift his parliamentary immunity). Only the two requests by the Procura of Rome were approved. Once again, as on 6 March, there was intense public indignation against the politicians' attempts to obstruct the magistrates' work. The PDS and the Greens immediately called upon their four ministers to resign, which they did. It was not a wise decision, for the responsibility for what had happened lay with parliament not government, and by retiring from the latter the opposition deprived itself of an important role at a crucial moment.109
In spite of this squally start, the Ciampi government, which was to remain in power until new national elections in March 1994, exercised a considerable calming influence on the crisis. The frenzied series of journées in miniature which had characterized the preceding months – 16 September 1992 (‘Black Wednesday’ for the lira), 15 December (Notice of Guarantee for Craxi), 15 January 1993 (arrest of Totòssss Riina), 5–6 March (the attempted muzzling of the magistrates by the Amato government), 28–9 March (Notices of Guarantee for Andreotti and Gava) – quietened its pace. In spite of its transitional nature and the little time available to it, or perhaps because of them both, the Ciampi government worked very well. It was relatively free from the interminable intra-party feuds of the past, and of the so-called ‘party delegations’ which had ensconced themselves so improperly in the Council of Ministers of previous governments. Ciampi managed to forge his ministers into a team, probably not as harmonious as he later claimed,110 but none the less something quite new for Italian politics.
When asked in 1994 what he considered to have been the single most significant achievement of his government, Ciampi replied ‘the agreement on labour costs’,111 and it is difficult to disagree with him. His equidistance from employers and employed was recognized by both, and resulted in the signing of the protocol of 3 July 1993, an ambitious and successful attempt to redefine Italian industrial relations. The protocol introduced a new incomes policy, and drew both trade unions and Confindustria into regular tripartite discussions with the government. The social peace which resulted from this far-sighted reform was to be of fundamental importance for Italy's economic recovery. However, it is worth pointing out the paradox of an unreformed trade-union movement being integrated into government at precisely the time when the political parties, under furious attack, were being ejected from it.112
The agreement on labour costs formed one pillar of Ciampi's economic policy. Another, in which his own reputation in Europe played an important role, consisted in the forceful reaffirmation of the strategy of the ‘external constraint’. At a time when Italy seemed very far from Europe, Ciampi continued to stress unequivocally the need to work towards respecting the parameters of the Maastricht Treaty and towards eventual monetary union. The budget law for 1994 was not a harsh one, at least by Amato's standards, amounting to some 38,000 billion lire.113 Furthermore, devaluation was not turning out to be the disaster that many had feared. As Italian goods and services cost much less on international markets (the value of the lira had continued to slip downwards until it settled at around 25 per cent less of its pre-September 1992 value), industry enjoyed an exceptional export boom and income from tourism increased. At the same time, thanks principally to the pegging of wages and salaries, in both the private and public sectors, inflation decreased significantly.114
A second, highly significant area of action was that concerning the public administration. In Ciampi's plans an unusual priority had been accorded to administrative reform, and in his government an unusual minister was called upon to realize it. Sabino Cassese had spent a lifetime studying the considerable problems of the Italian bureaucracy. Once in power, he belied the stereotype of the university professor and moved with the speed and energy of a whirlwind. His reforms followed a number of different paths. The first aimed to render the bureaucracy more reliable and comprehensible to its users. A ‘Charter of public services’ tried to make citizens aware of their rights, and established qualitative and quantitative standards of administrative behaviour. The law no. 241 of August, 1990,115 on the transparency of administrative procedures, was re-launched with great force. So too was ‘autocertificazione’, the right of citizens to declare their own civil status in a number of areas, without being obliged to seek certificates to that effect from the public administration. In addition, over 100 administrative procedures were radically simplified.
Cassese's reform also tried to render administrative structures less confused and oppressive. One ministry (that of the Merchant Marine), thirteen inter-ministerial committees, and more than seventy other collegial organs were suppressed. Savings of an estimated 2,600 billion lire were achieved in less than a year. Administrative action was rendered more neutral and transparent by revolutionizing the system of internal controls, modifying the tasks of the Corte dei Conti and issuing a ‘Code of behaviour for civil servants’. Finally, every effort was made to adapt the norms of the Italian bureaucracy to those of its European counterparts.116
Coming hard on the heels of Amato's decree law, and going considerably beyond it, Cassese's action represented the most concrete, ambitious and democratic attempt to realize bureaucratic reform in the history of the Republic. Not surprisingly, it encountered every manner of opposition – from the trade unions in defence of their corporative interests, from parts of the press, even from colleagues within the government.117 The lack of time available, when combined with Cassese's own indomitable personality, rendered progress difficult. The reforming minister had need of ten years, not less than one, to realize his grand scheme. He received considerable support from Ciampi, but unfortunately most of the public remained unaware of, and uninvolved in, the great struggle that was taking place.118
The last major reform of the Ciampi government was that of the electoral system. In its making and content the law of 4 August 1993 was the very opposite of the action taken with regard to the public administration, being a rather unsatisfactory compromise between a large number of actors in parliament and government.119 None the less, it represented a distinct move towards a majoritarian and bipolar system. Seventy-five per cent of the Senate and of the House of Deputies were to be elected on a simple majority basis and 707 single-member colleges were created for that purpose. The remaining 25 per cent of the members of parliament were to be elected by the previous method of proportional representation. An electoral system on the French model, with two turns, which would certainly have accentuated bipolarization, was discarded, as was the prospect of establishing, as in Germany, a bar of 5 per cent of the national vote for the smaller parties wishing to enter parliament.120
However, the gravest defect of all in the new law was its gender blindness. At this key moment in Italian politics, the transformations in women's education, their changing place in the family and their presence in the labour force, found little or no reflection in the country's institutions. On the contrary. Women candidates were to be penalized under the new system, because the parties tended to choose well-known, male candidates for single-member constituencies. Women were only 12.8 per cent of those elected in 1994, and only 9.3 per cent in 1996.121
While the Ciampi government moved on its reformist path, the inquiries of ‘Tangentopoli’ rolled relentlessly onwards. Twenty months after the arrest of Mario Chiesa, over 1,000 persons were under investigation, orders for preventive detention had been issued for more than 500 suspects, and there were more than 200 committals to trial. The investigations had touched every part of Italy's political, administrative, professional, and economic élites. Nearly 200 members of parliament were involved, many members of central and local administration, and many managers and businessmen in large and small companies.122 One of the most startling cases concerned Duilio Poggiolini, director from 1973 onwards of the pharmaceutical Department of the Ministry of Health. The inquiring magistrates uncovered an extensive network of corruption organized from within the Ministry. Poggiolini and his wife had accumulated a fortune of many billion lire, part of which was hidden in their flat in Rome inside a lilac-coloured footstool.123
Senior management from FIAT was under investigation, as was Carlo De Benedetti, managing director of Olivetti. However, the greatest scandal of the summer of 1993 was that concerning the Ferruzzi group and its former managing director Raul Gardini. The Enimont affair, the fusion between Ferruzzi's Montedison and the state-owned ENI in order to form a single giant petrochemical firm, was the single largest case of corporate corruption unearthed by the pool of Milan. It led in July 1993 to the suicides of both Raul Gardini at his home and of Gabriele Cagliari, former president of ENI, in the prison of San Vittore in Milan. It also led to the spectacular televised trial of Sergio Cusani, in which leading politicians were cross-examined by Antonio Di Pietro concerning their role in the affair.124
Both magistrates and politicians, as well as much of public opinion, called for a solution to ‘Tangentopoli’, but there was no agreement over its possible content. The magistrates demanded that trials be held swiftly and clear laws be introduced to prevent future corruption. The politicians, naturally enough, were more concerned with clemency. The Ciampi government was not able to resolve this rebus, and the question of justice remained a very strong element of tension in Italian politics. The balance of powers between legislature, executive and judiciary had been severely disturbed, and no one seemed capable of creating a new equilibrium.
To complete the picture of high uncertainty and tension, mention must be made of the Mafia bombs which exploded in the summer of 1993 in some of Italy's major cities, as attempted reprisals for the state's new-found activism. On 14 May the television journalist Maurizio Costanzo, who had given ample coverage to anti-Mafia initiatives, narrowly escaped being blown up. Twelve days later a bomb exploded at night close to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, causing five deaths and some fifty people injured. Two months later, during the night of 27–8 July, it was the turn of Milan and Rome. In the first five people were killed, and in the second the church of San Giovanni in Laterano was damaged. The Mafia was trying to send a clear message to the political authorities: if the latter did not change track, not only persons but also some of Italy's most famous monuments would be at risk.
The period of the Ciampi government also witnessed the disappearance of the two principal parties of government, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, as well as their minor allies the Liberals, Social Democrats and Republicans. The DC had tried desperately to survive in the glacial atmosphere of 1992–3. Arnaldo Forlani had handed over the post of secretary to Mino Martinazzoli, hoping that the latter's integrity would come to the rescue of the party as Zaccagnini's had done in the 1970s. It was too late. After a few months Martinazzoli announced that the DC would abandon its name, as the PCI had done before it, and would revert to that of the first Italian mass Catholic party, Don Sturzo's Popolari.
The DC had been the principal party of Italian democracy, and it is as well to remember that fact at a time when its reputation has reached such a low ebb. The party's fidelity to representative democracy guaranteed free elections and a plural society for Italy in the post-war years. For all their integralism, the leaders of the DC in the 1940s and early 1950s did not repress the principal opposition, that of the Communists, even if pliant magistrates, adopting Fascist laws, harassed it quite severely. Sometimes the Christian Democrats were ahead of the Pope of the time in their thinking on the connection between Catholicism and democracy; sometimes they were behind him. Never, though, did they waver in their formal commitment to democracy. Not by chance did they put the word Libertas at the centre of their political vocabulary and on the crusaders' shield which was the electoral symbol of their party.
It was also the case that certain of their initial choices, especially that of making Italy a founder member of the European Community, were in the long term of inestimable benefit to their country. Within their own ranks, they neither believed in, nor would tolerate, the sort of personal tyranny or over-lordship which were to characterize the political forces which took their place. For all the Byzantine workings of Christian Democrat factionalism, its net result was to prevent the supremacy of a single individual, as both Amintore Fanfani and Ciriaco De Mita discovered to their cost.
However, there was a dark side to the DC which should on no account be underestimated. It consisted basically in a clientelistic mediation of the affairs of the state, a modus operandi which recognized no clear laws or limits, no boundaries to possible alliances forged in the name of power, money or votes, and which gradually undermined the real content of the party's commitment to democracy. Obviously, different factions and personalities, as we have seen, interpreted this modus operandi in different ways, and chose to draw lines of limitation in different places. Some, though, drew no lines at all, and ended deep within the secret history of the Republic.
In historical terms, the origins of these tendencies go back a long way, and should not be facilely ascribed exclusively to the 1980s. Perhaps the key moment came early on, at the end of the 1940s, with the dispersion of Dossetti's group and the distortion of its heritage. Certainly, from that time onwards there was no major organized group which proposed a clear alternative to what became standard practice within the Christian democrat state system, at both national and local level. There existed, therefore, a fundamental though often hidden contradiction in the party's praxis, between its commitment to democracy in a European context, which led in one direction, and its habitual practice, which led in another. In the very particular circumstances of 1992–3, that contradiction exploded.125
As for the Socialists, they did not change their name, but simply disintegrated, itself an indication of how much they had come to rely on Craxi, and into what waters he had led them. The history of the Socialist party was a much longer one than that of the DC, and the nature and aspirations of the party had changed much more dramatically over time. Its first embodiment in the history of the Republic had been as a Marxist party locked into an iron alliance with the Communists. The era of the centre-left had changed that image rapidly, as well as sowing the seeds of later degeneration. Yet the leadership of Bettino Craxi, initially welcomed by many for its vigour, youth and modernism, transformed the party beyond recognition, sucking nearly all and sundry into a vortex of corrupt and authoritarian relations. It was to be a tragedy for Italian democracy that the final expression of its ancient and glorious Socialist party should take the form and content that it did, and that so many intelligent and highly educated people within that party accepted and even welcomed this state of affairs.
With the demise of the principal governing parties of the Republic, and the widespread movement of public opinion which had gathered behind the magistrates, it would have been reasonable to expect the major party of opposition, the PDS, to have become the principal beneficiary of the crisis. Yet this was not to be the case.
After a very problematic start,126 Achille Occhetto had done well to hold together the rump of the old PCI in the period 1991–3. The left-wing strongholds in the central regions of the country, which had contributed the great majority of the old Communist vote, by and large remained faithful to the new party in the 1990s.127 However, his party never managed to expand uniformly in the rest of the country, above all in the North, and thus stake a claim to a leadership position during the crisis. The reasons for this failure are many, but it is perhaps worth isolating three in particular.
The first was that the PDS itself felt menaced by the judicial offensive. From the first weeks of ‘Tangentopoli’, it became clear that elements of the party had in the past been involved in the malpractices of the system. Occhetto went back to the Bolognina section of the party128 to make a speech asking the pardon of the nation for the shortcomings of his former party. However, his gesture was not accompanied by any clear indications that the PDS really intended to come clean, or that it was prepared to reveal the skeletons in the Communist cupboard. The party seemed rather to have chosen a defensive strategy – waiting for the magistrates to find out what they could, and hoping that this did not amount to much.129 Such a strategy may have had short-term advantages, but it failed to establish the real differences between the PDS and its opponents, and the fundamental honesty of the vast majority of its militants. At the crucial moment of the national elections of March 1994, the PDS appeared as a result to be a more compromised element of the old system than it actually was.
Second, the PDS failed almost completely to launch initiatives that would have taken the crisis away from the courts and the television screens and into everyday life. In this respect, there re-emerged an old failing of the PCI: a certain immobility and lack of imagination with respect to modern social movements and civil society. To have challenged the many closed and often corrupt corporations of society, a revolt, pacific but determined, was necessary. Strangely enough, such revolt was alien to the political culture of the PCI/PDS. Instead, after decades of entrenched opposition, caution and mediation were their hallmarks. Faced with the choice between Gramsci's political categories of the war of position and the war of manoeuvre (metaphors culled from the type of warfare waged on the western and eastern fronts during the period 1914–18),130 there was no doubt that his heirs preferred the first. Indeed, they were culturally and temperamentally quite unprepared for the second. Yet this was probably exactly what was needed in a situation as fluid as that of 1992–3.
Finally, the left as a whole was unable to read correctly the trajectory of the crisis. This was a task of extraordinary difficulty, requiring a special political talent. With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to suggest that the moment of maximum disorientation of the old political forces was in the spring of 1993, and that that was the time to press for a greater leadership role. Instead, as we have just seen, the PDS no sooner entered government than it exited from it. There could have been no clearer sign of its political uncertainty.
The shortcomings of the left lead naturally into what must be considered one of the central questions in the analysis of these years: why was it that the crisis, having reached a high level of intensity and of rejection of the political culture of the past, slackened, and then took a turn in a quite different direction?
Some commentators, in the light of later delusions, have chosen to answer such a question by diminishing the overall importance of the events after 1992. Marco Revelli, for instance, with his habitual incisiveness and radicalism, has written of ‘the “mediocre” historical character of the crisis, perfectly in synchrony with the mediocrity of the political class that was shipwrecked by it, and with that which tried to take its place’.131 Yet such an interpretation risks doing little justice to the first year of the crisis, deeply disturbing as it was to so many levels of Italian public life.
The reasons why the crisis did not deepen or lead to greater cultural and political transformation are, like those concerning the failure of the left, many and complex. Indeed, the two are intimately interconnected. Here I would like to offer a few preliminary suggestions by way of a conclusion to this chapter.
Unlike in 1968–9, events in Italy in 1992–3 formed no part of a wider international or European movement. Their principal protagonists were investigating magistrates, who by the very nature of their profession were punitive, but not propositive. Within their ranks they could make alliances; both Borrelli in Milan and Caselli in Palermo continually emphasized how intimate was the link between the struggle against the Mafia and that against corruption in public life. However, even within the narrow ranks of the magistracy those involved in the investigations of ‘Tangentopoli’ were in a minority. There were many others who were hostile, suspicious, or with guilty consciences. Much of the history from 1994 onwards consisted of an unedifying and often incomprehensible battle between different parts of the judiciary or even single magistrates.
In order for the battle in Milan, as well as that in Palermo, to reach a successful conclusion, the reforming magistrates had to find other allies, both within the state and outside of it. They enjoyed the constant support in this period of the President of the Republic, but too many of the other institutions and personnel of the Italian state felt threatened rather than liberated by their actions. In any case, a minority of magistrates could not act as a surrogate for political leadership. That, as we have seen, was largely lacking. The PDS supported the legal offensive more than any other party did, but at the same time it was afraid of it. Furthermore, the party leadership lacked the capacity to connect the different spheres of the crisis. Cassese's attempted reform, for instance, of great historical significance for an economy dominated by services, and for the relationship between citizen and state, badly needed political support, much publicity and the mobilization of consumers. None of these was forthcoming.
However, it is always too easy to blame political leaderships, to let explanatory weight fall casually upon the shoulders of single political actors. There were deeper structural problems at work, which concerned the nature of Italian public opinion, and the limited extent of civil society. The magistrates of Milan requested a general return to legality, but this was no mean demand in the Italy of the 1990s. Interpreted literally, it would have meant many ordinary Italian families having to ask uncomfortable questions about their own behaviour, about how the dominant political culture of clientelism, nepotism, tax evasion, and so on, was their own. It was one thing to sit round the television and rejoice in the humiliation of Arnaldo Forlani at the hands of Antonio Di Pietro during the Cusani trial.132 It was quite another to apply the same standards of judgement to the microprocesses which connected families to society and the state. In this respect Revelli was right when he wrote of the ‘mixture of exasperation and passivity’ which characterized the crisis.133