1992 Italian presidential election

The 1992 Italian presidential election was held in Italy on 13–25 May 1992, following the resignation of President Francesco Cossiga on 28 April 1992.

1992 Italian presidential election

13–25 May 1992

1,014 voters
(326 Senators, 630 Deputies
and 58 regional representatives)

676 (1st–3rd ballots) or 508 (4th ballot onwards) votes needed to win
 
Nominee Oscar Luigi Scalfaro Gianfranco Miglio
Party DC Lega Nord
Electoral vote 672 75
Percentage 66.3% 7.4%

Result on the sixteenth ballot
(25 May 1992)

  Scalfaro 672   Miglio 75   Others 206

  Invalids, blanks, abstentions 61

President before election

Francesco Cossiga
DC

Elected President

Oscar Luigi Scalfaro
DC

Only members of Parliament and regional delegates were entitled to vote, most of these electors having been elected in the 1992 general election and in the 1990 regional elections. As head of state of the Italian Republic, the president has a role of representation of national unity and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the Italian Constitution, in the framework of a parliamentary system.

Procedure

In accordance with the Italian Constitution, the election was held in the form of a secret ballot, with the Senators and the Deputies entitled to vote. The election was held in the Palazzo Montecitorio, home of the Chamber of Deputies, with the capacity of the building expanded for the purpose. The first three ballots required a two-thirds majority of the 1,014 voters in order to elect a president, or 676 votes. Starting from the fourth ballot, an absolute majority was required for candidates to be elected, or 508 votes. The presidential mandate lasts seven years.

The election was presided over by the president of the Chamber of Deputies Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, who proceeded to the public counting of the votes (with the exception of the last ballot when the count was made by the vice president Stefano Rodotà), and by the vice president of the Senate Luigi Granelli, since the Senate president Giovanni Spadolini was serving as acting president of the Republic.

Candidates

Political background

On 28 April 1992 President Francesco Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term. The reason of his resignation was related to a growing tension between Cossiga and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. This tension emerged in October 1990 when Andreotti revealed the existence of Gladio, a stay-behind organization with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Cossiga acknowledged his involvement in the establishment of the organization.[1][2] Subsequently in 1991 the Democratic Party of the Left asked to start a procedure of impeachment against him (Presidents of Italy can be impeached only for high treason against the State or for an attempt to overthrow the Constitution).[3][4] Although he threatened to prevent the impeachment procedure by dissolving Parliament, the impeachment request was ultimately dismissed.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Italian politics was undergoing a period of instability and growing tensions. In February 1991, the Northern League, which was first launched as an upgrade of the Northern Alliance in December 1989, was officially transformed into a party through the merger of various regional parties, notably including Lombard League and Venetian League, under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. These continue to exist as "national sections" of the federal party, which presents itself in regional and local contests as "Northern League–Lombard League", "Northern League–Venetian League", "Northern League Piedmont", and so on.[5][6][7] The League exploited resentment against the centralised, Rome-based Italian government (with the famous slogan Roma ladrona, "Rome (is a) robber"), common in the North as many there felt that the government wasted resources collected mostly from northerners' taxes.[8] Cultural influences from bordering countries in the North and resentment against illegal immigrants were also exploited. The party's electoral successes began roughly at a time when public disillusionment with the established political parties was at its height. The Tangentopoli corruption scandals, which invested most of the established parties, were unveiled from 1992 on.[6][7] However, contrarily to what many pundits observed at the beginning of the 1990s, LN became a stable political force and it is by far the oldest party among those represented in the Italian Parliament. The Northern League's first electoral breakthrough was at the 1990 regional elections, but it was with the 1992 general election that the party emerged as a leading political actor. Having gained 8.7% of the vote, 56 deputies and 26 senators,[9] it became the fourth largest party of the country and within Parliament.

In 1991 the Italian Communist Party split into the Democratic Party of the Left, led by Achille Occhetto, and the Communist Refoundation Party, headed by Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the communists since 1988, stunned the party faithfully assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now referred to in Italian politics as the svolta della Bolognina (Bolognina turning point). The collapse of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had convinced Occhetto that the era of Eurocommunism was over, and he transformed the Communist Party into a progressive left-wing party, the Democratic Party of the Left. A third of the Communist Party's former members, led by Cossutta, refused to join the PDS, and instead founded the Communist Refoundation Party.[10]

On 17 February 1992, judge Antonio Di Pietro had Mario Chiesa, a member of the Italian Socialist Party, arrested for accepting a bribe from a Milan cleaning firm. The Italian Socialist Party distanced themselves from Chiesa. Bettino Craxi called Mario Chiesa mariuolo, or "villain", a "wild splinter" of the otherwise clean PSI. Upset over this treatment by his former colleagues, Chiesa began to give information about corruption implicating his colleagues. This marked the beginning of the Mani pulite investigation; news of political corruption began spreading in the press.

The 1992 general election, held on 5 April that year, marked a huge earthquake for the Italian politics. Christian Democracy suffered a significant swing against it, but the coalition it had led prior to the elections managed to retain a small majority. Opposition parties won a significant amount of support. The resulting parliament was therefore weak and difficult to bring to an agreement. The so called "CAF" alliance (the Craxi-Andreotti-Forlani axis), a pact to revive the Pentapartito coalition—the scheme was conceived in 1991 to allow Giulio Andreotti to become the next President of the Italian Republic and Bettino Craxi to become the next Prime Minister—had been heavily crushed by the popular vote.

In this context, the Italian Parliament convened to elect the new President on 13 May 1992. As the count progressed no candidate was able to emerge, not even Giulio Andreotti whose candidacy was soon made to sink, and the voting process ended up in a real political deadlock. While the count was still ongoing, on 23 May 1992 the popular anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police escort agents were killed by a bomb put on the Highway A29 by the Sicilian mafia near Capaci. The huge wave of public indignation and anger for this crime forced the Parliament to quickly elect a new President and solve the political deadlock. On 25 May 1992, the President of the Chamber of Deputies Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, seen as a man above the parts and as a true defender of the republican institutions, was finally elected President and officially sworn in on 28 May 1992.

Results

Candidate 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11st 12nd 13rd 14th 15th 16th
Giorgio De Giuseppe296284257
Nilde Iotti1831822452562492352332143224
Giuliano Vassalli15214313932618818917135126
Paolo Volponi515150
Norberto Bobbio2625252324253166992
Antonio Cariglia202321
Tina Anselmi1918331818191518174
Salvatore Valitutti19212221
Gianfranco Miglio787777757679827877778079797475
Alfredo Pazzaglia48474951543
Mino Martinazzoli6132963222632
Giovanni Spadolini6820283534111161613232020227
Emilio Colombo5917
Arnaldo Forlani46947968107
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro68876101325242410972117672
Guido Carli1920132
Roland Riz1213121413
Ettore Gallo5256681925251
Vincenzo Muccioli746
Augusto Barbera1924
Francesco De Martino2104235
Giovanni Conso3322322222532354
Aldo Aniasi1420
Cesare Dujany1212
Paolo Borsellino47
Leo Valiani244336
Amintore Fanfani12
Francesco Cossiga2223242363
Giulio Andreotti42238116
Other candidates292332135623404074173235515523
Blank papers45463231717621617530025725159353339738
Invalid papers669221107341412411
Voting8699919815119939946646256426356636146069369411,002
Present8699919818339939949869239429409679189089829421,002
Source: Parliament of Italy

Notes

    References

    1. Bloomberg: Francesco Cossiga, Italy's Combative Former President, Dies at Age 82
    2. "Italy: Former president Francesco Cossiga dies at 82 - Adnkronos Politics". Adnkronos. Archived from the original on 15 December 2018. Retrieved 3 August 2015.
    3. "Occhetto, lo strappo mai ricucito su Gladio". Il Sole 24 Ore (in Italian). 18 August 2010. Retrieved 26 January 2022.
    4. Marroni, Stefano (4 December 1991). "Il PDS vota l'impeachment di Cossiga". La Repubblica (in Italian). Retrieved 26 January 2022.
    5. Ignazi, Pietro (2008). Partiti politici in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. p. 88.
    6. Ginsborg, Paul (1996). L'Italia del tempo presente. Turin: Einaudi. pp. 336–337, 534–535.
    7. Galli, Giorgio (2001). I partiti politici italiani. Milan: BUR. pp. 379–380, 384.
    8. Rumiz, Paolo (2001). La secessione leggera. Dove nasce la rabbia del profondo Nord. Milan: Feltrinelli. pp. 10–13.
    9. Parenzo, David; Romano, Davide (2009). Romanzo padano. Da Bossi a Bossi. Storia della Lega. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer. pp. 263–266.
    10. Kertzer, David I. (1998). Politics and Symbols: The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07724-7.
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