I’ll tell you about the coup d’état in 1992
There was an "illegal negotiation" around Tangentopoli, which marked the end of the First Republic. Damato's Scratches
For the graphic clamor of the announcement, on the entire front page of yesterday's Riformista , with that photo of Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Gherardo Colombo and Antonio Di Pietro in the Milan Gallery, the headline on the "coup d'état" in 1992 and " the illegal negotiation" recounted between the magistrates and the political class involved in their investigations into the illegal financing of politics, some will have been led to think of a paradoxical and a little too arbitrary sortie by their friend the director Piero Sansonetti, who took so long signature and face. Or to his forced reading of the introduction written by Gherardo Colombo to the posthumous book by Enzo Carra, the spokesman of Arnaldo Forlani and the DC exhibited in the corridors of the Milan court with slaves on his wrists in 1993.
There is instead nothing paradoxical, arbitrary, exaggerated and so on. If a relief can really be moved to Piero it is that he represented that of Gherardo Colombo – one of the leading magistrates of the Milanese pool of "Clean Hands" – as "a hitherto unknown and shocking aspect of that season" which resulted in the beheading, end and anything else of the so-called first Republic. Many were, indeed we were aware that behind the scenes of the sensational arrests, of the lines of pentiti or similar in front of the Milan prosecutor's office to uncover Tangentopoli, of the processions praising the handcuffs, not the real negotiations shouted by Piero evoking the full body threat political, like the one later contested for the relationship between the mafia and politics in the internship season, but something that closely resembled. Study meetings were even held for the so-called political exit from Tangentopoli, consisting of a substantial confession of the accused or accused and their commitment to withdraw from politics in exchange for judicial, or penal, if you prefer, salvation.
On the other hand, it was precisely from that traffic of meetings, consultations, planning that in March 1993 came out, in a "package" of government measures then presided over by Giuliano Amato, the famous law decree which was made out to the minister Giovanni Conso. Moreover, he had the courtesy to call me to ask me not to continue attributing to him in such a direct and exclusive way that provision, which decriminalized the crime of illegal financing of parties and, more generally, of politics.
THE "POLITICAL RESPONSE" IN TANGENTOPOLIS
Please re-read here with me the summary posted in the Unit of Saturday 6 March 1993 to an article by Fabrizio Rondolino on the birth of the government: "The "political response" to Tangentopoli is called decriminalization (retroactive) of the crime of violation of public funding . Overcoming DC's uncertainties and Conso's perplexities, Amato imposes the reform by decree. Now it's up to Parliament to convert it into law. And the timing coincides with the referendum campaign. In short, the future of government is full of pitfalls”.
The referendum campaign was the one for the abolition of the law on the public financing of parties. And that coincidence was among the causes, if not the only one invoked more explicitly by the then President of the Republic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro for refusing to sign the decree for the decriminalization of the crime of violation of that law: a signature that instead many, starting with by Giuliano Amato, who would later publicly complain about it in an interview with Corriere della Sera , they took for granted. Discounted because the meeting of the Council of Ministers dedicated to the provision had been repeatedly interrupted for consultations with the Quirinale.
The first immediate comments on the decree law, starting with that of the founder and still director of the Republic Eugenio Scalfari, were comprehensive, in the belief that the provision also responded to the opinions expressed, collected and whatever else in the judicial environment more directly concerned with the investigations with that high-sounding name, I repeat, of "Clean Hands", but perhaps not too much, if not even accompanied, as someone titled, to "dirty consciences".
It was precisely to contest the impression of an agreement stipulated behind the scenes with the investigators, in short of the "negotiation" evoked by Sansonetti using Gherardo Colombo's preface to Carra's book, that Borrelli himself publicly pronounced himself against the law decree approved by the Council of Ministers, making those who had given a substantially favorable or acceptable reading change their minds, starting with the head of state. Which, coincidentally, after and not before the sensational sortie of the head of the Milan prosecutor's office announced the refusal to sign it, changing the habits of the Quirinale for the second time, or the practice as the experts prefer to say.
The previous time was that of 1992, when the consultations of the head of state for the formation of the first government of the legislature that came out of the polls in the ordinary elections had been extended, to say the least, by the parliamentary groups and their respective parties to Borrelli. Who had to report on the ongoing investigations – always those of "Clean Hands" – in such a way that Scalfaro then did not consider he could confer the office of prime minister on Bettino Craxi, which the DC led by Arnaldo Forlani was about to formally propose to him . The head of state managed to convince the socialist leader, of whom he had been interior minister in his first experience as prime minister, to give up spontaneously and to propose himself the preferred party partner. Giuliano Amato, Gianni De Michelis and Claudio Martelli, replied Craxi adding: "in order not only alphabetically". It is no longer news, but history.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/tangentopoli-mani-pulite-colpo-di-stato-1992/ on Sat, 08 Apr 2023 05:02:26 +0000.