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Italy: President Elected, Red Brigades Resurrected© Peter Weber
Jun 9, 1999
With the swift election of the new state president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi Italy's political class has given a rare and surprising example of efficiency and responsibility. The former prime minister, finance minister and central banker has been elected due to an agreement between the majority and the opposition. In the past Ciampi has always proved master of a new style of consensus policy and therefore his election has now grown new hopes for the long awaited Constitutional reforms. Before that, however, parties have to run the test of the European elections on June 13th, which could even jeopardize the government stability. Meanwhile in Rome the historic terrorist group "Red Brigades" has made an unexpected return, killing a high government official.
Unreliable unreliability
"In this country you can't rely on anything and not even on its unreliability", exclaimed Italy's senior journalist Indro Montanelli (91). "Everybody of us was preparing to assist an endless and exhausting electoral soap opera following a path covered with mines and traps, crossed vetoes, cheating, occult maneuvers, treason, front changes and all those unscrupulous games of which our political class is all too capable. But then everything has resolved in one shot, before the trouble even began".
Montanelli said that he almost couldn't believe his eyes and so did probably many of his compatriots. The surprise was complete when just one day before the massacre should have started Italy's political class compromised on finance minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (79) as the next President of the Republic. The miracle was made possible by an agreement between the current prime minister Massimo D'Alema (DS) and opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia), a former mass-media-tycoon, who one day in January 1994 decided to enter politics and since then has done little more than promoting his company's economic interests. This time, however, Berlusconi, who had been Ciampi's successor as prime minister in 1994, took everybody by surprise with a sudden attack of statesmanlike responsibility.
An unexpected agreement
When Berlusconi announced the astonished majority-leader Massimo D'Alema that the opposition was ready to accept the majority's proposal and vote for Ciampi, the position of D'Alema's ally, Franco Marini (PPI), who had been intriguing for his own election, became unsustainable and all speculations vanished in a haze. Marini, leader of the center-left Christian-democrats, is without doubt the major loser of this sudden turn and he is now supposed to be forced to step down from his party office on the next PPI-congress, especially if his party should loose even the forthcoming European elections.
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