as the collapse of the Eastern Bloc served as the trigger for the dissolution of the PCI. Later, we will look more closely at the PCI’s demise and the consequences this had for the broader Italian left. Its immediate effect, however, was to undermine the solidarity on the other side of the political spectrum, among forces long cohered by their anti-communism. In autumn 1990 came revelations of Gladio, the so-called ‘stay-behind operation’ that NATO had developed in order to prepare military resistance to a PCI coup or Soviet invasion. When President Francesco Cossiga, in one of his characteristic outbursts, openly admitted his role in Gladio, the left-wing parties demanded his impeachment, soon forcing his resignation. Yet as Cossiga himself noted, once the Berlin Wall had fallen, the forces ‘pushing from the other side’ – notably the DC – were not going to be left standing either.6
The downfall of the old edifice began in 1992 with the arrest of the Socialist Mario Chiesa, a leading light in the Milan PSI. As administrator of the city’s Pio Albergo Trivulzio nursing home, Chiesa received tens of millions of lire in kickbacks from the cleaning company boss Luca Magni in exchange for contracts. When Magni, unable to withstand the mounting payments, finally reported the situation to the magistrate Antonio di Pietro, a sting operation was set in motion against the corrupt machine politician. On the early evening of 17 February, Magni entered Chiesa’s office with a secret microphone and camera; when the Socialist agreed to the transaction, as expected, the carabinieri burst into the room. Alarmed, Chiesa bolted into the toilet with the 37 million lire (about €20,000) in cash from another bribe, which he then attempted, in vain, to hide in the cistern. As the news spread across the TV networks, party boss Bettino Craxi tried to dismiss Chiesa as a ‘lone crook’: the Milan PSI, in the nation’s ‘moral capital’ was, after all run by ‘honest people’.
Not all were convinced. Already in a May 1991 article for Milan magazine Società civile, the magistrate Di Pietro had written of a mounting climate of impunity – in his view, public tendering should be characterised
less in terms of corruption or abuse of office than an environment of illegal payments, an objective situation in which those who have to pay no longer even wait to be asked for it, knowing that in this climate bribes and payoffs are customary.7
As far back as 1974, the scandali dei petroli had exposed the corrupt dealings between oil company bosses and leading politicians. But what more dramatically broke the political system apart in 1992 was its loss of internal solidarity. Cast off by his party and thrown in jail, Chiesa soon began to talk, revealing the vast web of bribe money that the PSI had orchestrated. As the ‘Milan pool’ judges picked up the men he named, a domino effect developed, and party underlings informed on others to save themselves. Of 4,520 people investigated in Milan, 1,281 were convicted, 965 through plea bargains.
Tearing through the webs of connivance within the old party machines, the Clean Hands process was marked by a robust judicial activism. As judge Francesco Saverio Borrelli said of the politicians investigated, ‘we imprison them to make them talk. We let them go after they speak’. However, the spectacle surrounding the cases and the magistrates’ rise to public prominence fed their own direct integration into the political field itself. The televised cross-examinations, and especially Di Pietro’s brusque tones in the courtroom, upended the First Republic’s characteristic etiquette, as stuffy institutional obfuscators were confronted by the crusading spirit of the prosecutor. This was also complemented by a kind of mob justice driven by media, not least as some of those on trial began to hurl muck at one another. When the Milan pool judges began a trial of local officials from the post-Communist Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left; PDS), Lega leader Umberto Bossi proudly marched his supporters into the courtroom to shake Di Pietro’s hand before the cameras. The Lega leader himself soon admitted receiving massive illicit sums from the Montedison industrial group.
The image of the strident prosecutor-saviour, exposing the failings of a moribund party system on behalf of cheated Italians, was particularly brought into relief by the government’s feeble response. In a clumsy bid to slow the tide of arrests, on 5 March 1993 the administration led by PSI premier Giuliano Amato issued the Decreto Conso, which sought to turn ‘illicit party financing’ from a criminal to an administrative offense. This decree moreover contained a ‘silent clause’, which would effectively have allowed it to apply retroactively, thus cutting short thousands of Clean Hands investigations. The Milan pool judges responded with a televised address warning the public of what this really meant, and amid the ensuing uproar the president refused to sign off the government’s text. Instead, the political crisis deepened, with news on 27 March that the Palermo public prosecutor was investigating one of the First Republic’s linchpins, former DC premier and long-time minister Giulio Andreotti, for Mafia ties. The party system was being brought to its knees.
The malaise spread across partisan divides – and fed calls for a change in the forms of politics. This was particularly expressed in criticism of party lists – the electoral system by which candidates favoured by party machines could be guaranteed election to parliament. An institutional referendum on 18 April saw more than four-fifths of voters back a new system, favouring first-past-the-post contests more akin to the US and UK systems. With 75 per cent of seats distributed on such a basis, the new Mattarellum law promised to hand voters direct control over individual officials at the local level. Yet the sitting parliament remained under control of the established parties, and even after Amato’s government resigned on 21 April, the Chamber of Deputies was in self-preservation mode. On 29 April, a lower house over half of whose members were under judicial investigation voted to shield Craxi from prosecution. The editor of La Repubblica, Italy’s leading daily, called it the darkest day in postwar history – when the PSI leader appeared outside Rome’s Hotel Raphael, he was angrily confronted by coin-throwing demonstrators shouting ‘Why don’t you take this, too?’ Craxi’s reply was simply to accuse rivals of hypocrisy – in decades past, after all, the PCI had taken money from Moscow. But the First Republic, too, was about to go the same way as the Eastern Bloc states.
TV Populism
The April 1992 general election, held just weeks after Mario Chiesa’s rush to the toilet, came too early to be determined by Clean Hands. The big losers were, in fact, the heirs to the Communist Party, reeling from both the break-up of the PCI and a wider liberal triumphalism surrounding the demise of the Soviet Union. The first real sign of the post– Clean Hands political dynamics instead came with the local elections held in June and November 1993, where, for the first time, Italians directly elected city mayors. The Christian-Democrats were everywhere defeated, securing only 12 per cent of the votes cast in the capital; the dominant party here was instead the post-Communist PDS, which took Rome and Naples as well as backing the winning candidate in Turin. Yet the most remarkable news came in Milan, where the Lega Nord romped to victory, and with the advances for the postfascist MSI. This far-right party made the run-offs in both Rome (where it took 47 per cent in the second round) and Naples, where Alessandra Mussolini garnered 44 per cent of the vote. If the elections most of all saw the old government parties punished, the second-round ballottaggi had also shown conservatives’ willingness to rally behind even postfascist candidates to block the PDS.
This also heralded a wider realignment on the right wing of Italian politics. Indeed, if the PDS scored major local successes, the collapse of Christian Democracy was also opening the way for other forces – not just those carrying forth the message of Clean Hands, but also those who sought to put a stop to it. This was particularly evident in the intervention of one of Craxi’s long-standing allies, the billionaire TV entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi. Long an associate but not a member of the PSI, his allegiances instead lay with the Propaganda Due masonic lodge, a fraternity that united mainstream politicians with mob bosses and far-right terrorists. Having come under investigation for his ties to organised crime – and faced with a likely PDS victory in the coming general election – the tycoon sought an immunity for himself rather like that which Craxi had briefly secured. On 26 January 1994, Berlusconi issued a televised address announcing that he himself would ‘enter the field’ (scendere
