pure electoral convenience rather than common
aims or mutual trust. It was replaced by an uneasy
five-party coalition headed by a Christian Demo-
crat and including Craxi’s Socialists. March 1988
saw another administration formed by a Christian
Democratic premier in increasingly uneasy part-
nership with Craxi. This administration succeeded
in passing the long-overdue abolition of secret
voting in the Chamber on most issues. When in
March 1989, Craxi withdrew his party from the
coalition, the Christian Democrat prime minister
resigned. It took nine weeks to find a new pre-
mier. In July 1989, the veteran politician Giulio
Andreotti became prime minister for the sixth
time, leading the forty-ninth post-war administra-
tion, yet another five-party coalition, including
Craxi’s Socialists. Thus the stability of government
continued to rest on the cooperation of the
Christian Democrats and Socialists, which allowed
Craxi pretty much to name his conditions.
A feature of Italian politics unique in Western
Europe was the relatively small change in the
shares of the vote on left and right. Majorities in
parliament could at times be secured only by strik-
ing bargains with the communists, who were thus
able to influence the national government without
being part of it. In the regions a Socialist–
communist alliance was not unusual, so the com-
munists were not entirely excluded from the polit-
ical coalitions that ran Italy. In the early 1990s the
Christian Democrats had been in power as the
largest partner in coalition governments without
interruption since the liberation. Changes of pol-
icy had, nevertheless, occurred, changes which
roughly mirrored the political swings in the rest
of Western Europe. In Italy, however, they were
the result not of governments changing hands
between opposite parties, but of the parties them-
selves changing direction. Party policies were
pragmatic. The Communist Party had altered
course; the Socialist Party was hardly ‘socialist’;
the Christian Democrats did not always follow
policies to the right of centre – all this made
changes of direction in government possible. The
1990s brought old problems once more grimly to
the surface: the web of Mafia corruption and drug
trafficking had spread to the north. The whole of
Italy was shocked when in the spring and summer
of 1992 two of Italy’s most prominent Mafia
judges were murdered. Organised crime appeared
to be beyond the control of the government.
Corruption scandals further alienated the people
from the self-serving politicians. The huge deficit
caused by government spending had doubled the
country’s debts during the 1980s. At the same
time, Italy’s infrastructure – its railways, its roads,
its telecommunications – was crumbling.
Somehow Italian politics had managed to defy
gravity in the past. A founding member of the
European Community, Italy enthusiastically
backed the monetary and political union envis-
aged by the Maastricht Treaty, but its parlous
economic condition made the idea of conver-
gence with the economies of France and Germany
within a few years difficult to take seriously.
The general election in 1992 weakened the
four-party governing coalition, leaving it with so
small a majority that it could not hope to push
through any reforming measures. As a result,
Giuliano Amato, the deputy leader of the Socialist
Party, was asked by the president to form the
fifty-first Italian government. Amato was faced
with the problem of gaining parliamentary
approval for necessary financial reforms, to cut
welfare and pension payments. There was no
other way to meet Italy’s burgeoning deficit. In
September 1992 it suffered the indignity, in
company with Britain, of having to devalue and
leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the early
1990s Italy seemed to have reached a turning
point. Political scandal, Mafia criminality and an
economic debacle threatened a continuous
national crisis unless fundamental reforms were
carried through, and not just talked about.
The criminal investigations begun by members
of the judiciary in Milan in 1992 involving Craxi
snowballed in 1993 to reveal endemic political
and financial corruption throughout the upper
echelons of local and national government and in
commerce. Even Andreotti, the veteran political
survivor, seven times prime minister, was accused
of being in the service of the Mafia. The collapse
of the Cold War in any case altered the shape of
Italian politics. Government coalitions formed
around the Christian Democrats and Socialists
to keep the communists out had lost their raison