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News •
Organized crime dominated whole regions politically, socially, and economically by the 1980s. In Campania and Naples the Camorra controlled whole swaths of the urban landscape and the underground economy. Several politicians were linked to the Camorra when it siphoned off huge sums of state relief funding after the 1980 earthquake. The ’Ndranghetta organization in Calabria specialized in kidnappings and drug smuggling. In Puglia the Nuova Sacra Corona held sway, while the Mafia dominated Sicily. In Sardinia, bandits continued to operate in some regions, and, although anti-kidnapping laws had been somewhat effective, high-profile kidnappings dominated the news for months.
In addition, organized crime used violence to block enforcement of environmental protection laws and the establishment of public parks (which reduced opportunities for illegal construction) in Sicily and Sardinia in particular. Throughout the south, illegal construction was rife, and successive government amnesties—the last in 1994—further encouraged these builders. It was only after 1996 that the state began to act seriously against illegal construction, and it demolished houses and villas in natural parks in Sicily and Rome.
During the mid-1980s the state and civil society began to move, finally, against the hegemonic control of organized crime. After a series of high-profile Mafia assassinations of major political and institutional figures, above all prefect-general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (and his wife) in Palermo in 1982, local elites began to evolve a strategy for combating the Mafia. A key Mafia figure, Tommaso Buscetta, turned state’s evidence in 1984 in defiance of the organization’s code of silence. Buscetta was the first to provide detailed information on the workings and plans of the Mafia. His testimony led to hundreds of arrests of key Mafia leaders and henchmen. Soon other mafiosi turned state’s evidence that helped prosecutors win convictions of important Mafia bosses. In addition, the Mafia families became involved in a damaging internal war in the 1980s that left more than 1,000 dead. Finally, there were moves from within the Christian Democratic Party itself against the Mafia after the murder in 1980 of the Christian Democratic Sicilian regional president Piersanti Mattarella, a traditional politician who had decided to lead a campaign against corruption in Sicily. The state passed strong anti-Mafia laws for the first time, and several trials in 1986 condemned hundreds of mafiosi to long prison sentences.
The Mafia took its revenge in devastating yet counterproductive fashion. In 1992 Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who had both presided over anti-Mafia trials, were killed in horrific bomb attacks that left another nine people (bodyguards and relatives) dead. These murders galvanized the anti-Mafia movement. Even parliament—which had been stalled on the election of a new president, leaving Italy in a sort of power vacuum—came out of its stupor to elect Oscar Luigi Scalfaro in the aftermath of the Falcone bombing.
Beginning in 1993, authorities arrested several remaining key Mafia figures. Corruption investigations in the early 1990s permitted the prosecution of previously immune political figures who had links to the Mafia. In 1993 seven-time prime minister Guilio Andreotti was charged with collusion with the Mafia, a move that shook the political system to its foundations, although Andreotti was later absolved after a long and dramatic trial. Giancarlo Caselli continued the work of Falcone and Borsellino. Leoluca Orlando, an anti-Mafia campaigner, was elected mayor of Palermo in 1993 and 1997 with huge majorities. The city and the region began to stabilize, although no one believed that the Mafia had been entirely defeated. In Naples as well, the judges began to break down the powerful Camorra organizations, which were engaged in a bloody internal civil war that had left hundreds of young people dead. Leading politicians and Camorra bosses were arrested and charged.
In the late 1990s, however, the Mafia appeared to be making something of a comeback, although it seemed to have abandoned the tactics of direct confrontation with the state. The right—and in particular the new party called Forza Italia (“Go Italy”), led by Silvio Berlusconi—made continual attacks on anti-Mafia judges and the use of supergrass evidence (ex-mafiosi who turn state’s evidence), especially after leading members of Forza Italia itself were implicated in Mafia corruption. These attacks resulted in the ouster of one of the most prominent anti-Mafia judges, Giancarlo Caselli, in 1999. These events suggested a return to previous patterns of government noninterference, albeit much less overt than in the past.
Italy at the turn of the 21st century
Emergence of the “second republic”
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ended the Cold War pattern that had marked Italian politics since the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the wake of growing economic prosperity and the challenges of globalization, most Italians had come to resent the corrupt and costly system of patronage and the large state economic sector that hampered Italy’s competitiveness and tarnished its political culture. With the bankruptcy of Cold War ideologies and partitocrazia, the party system itself began to appear outdated, politicians experimented with new forms of organization and communication, and shifting alliances replaced the solid blocs of the Cold War world.
The end of the Cold War had an immediate impact on Italy’s two biggest parties. Ongoing scandals and the loss of anticommunist appeal brought a further decline in the popularity of the Christian Democrats, who won only 29.7 percent of the vote in the 1992 elections. Under its new leader, Achille Occhetto, the Communist Party adopted a more moderate program and, in 1991, even took a new name: the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra; PDS). In the same year, a small group of die-hard Communists split off to form the Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista; PRC), which became one of the more important small parties, gaining about 5 percent of the vote in the national elections of 1994 and 1996. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe after 1989 undermined the communist subculture in Italy, and the PDS vote declined further to 16.1 percent in the 1992 elections. Nonetheless, the PDS remained the most important center-left party.
Public protests against political corruption had little effect until 1992, when investigating magistrates in Milan began uncovering a series of bribery scandals. The city soon became known as “Bribesville” (Tangentopoli), and under “Operation Clean Hands” many leading politicians, civil servants, and prominent businessmen were arrested and imprisoned. Nearly all of Italy’s political parties were involved, but the Christian Democrats and the Socialists were the heart of the system. Craxi, the former prime minister, was eventually convicted on multiple charges and escaped imprisonment only by fleeing to Tunisia, where he died in 2000. By mid-1993 more than 200 deputies were under investigation, as were several former ministers, in a series of televised and closely followed trials. Protests about irregularities in the investigations fell on deaf ears at first but gradually began to pick up support.
Apart from the PDS, whose role in the corruption was limited, the main political parties dissolved in disgrace in 1993 and 1994, some to reappear under new names and with new leaders. The Christian Democrats became the Italian Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano; PPI), although some former Christian Democrats left the party to form several smaller Catholic-inspired political groupings. Members of the neofascist MSI (which had remained largely outside of the system of corruption) formed the new National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale; AN). The Socialists, so important to the political system since the 1960s, became irrelevant. It was an extraordinary, unprecedented reshaping of an entire political system.
In 1993 voters approved several referenda, later ratified by parliament, to alter the electoral law so that thenceforth three-fourths of deputies and senators would be elected from single-member constituencies rather than proportionally. Socialist Prime Minister Giuliano Amato (1992–93), whose government had been rocked by the corruption scandal, resigned shortly after the passage of the referendum, and President Scalfaro asked Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to step in and form a government to implement the electoral reforms and stabilize the economy. The collapse of the existing party system and national elections under the new law the following year marked the end of partitocrazia and the beginning of a new political order.
