Giulio Andreotti, who has died aged 94, was the ultimate insider
of Italian political life. For half a century he was at the heart of
power. His tenure at the highest echelons of government was unequalled
in Europe. From the early 1960s to the early 90s, he was – almost
uninterruptedly – either prime minister or a senior minister. Andreotti
was in all but six of the 45 governments that ran from May 1947 to April
1992, led seven of them and, at various times, was the minister
of defence, foreign affairs (five times), finance, treasury, and
interior. He held the post of prime minister for longer than any other
postwar Italian politician except Silvio Berlusconi, yet he never led
the Christian Democratic party.
His tenacity in remaining at the
centre of affairs became a source of fascination in itself. Just as
Julius Caesar had become Divo Giulio, the god Julius, so the makers of
the 2008 film Il Divo, a biopic about Andreotti, attributed to the
infinitely pragmatic modern Giulio seemingly mesmeric powers all the
more striking for his superficial drabness.
Andreotti was the most
controversial figure in the political life of what came to be known as
Italy's First Republic (from 1946 to the political and constitutional
turmoil of 1992-94). As a senior Christian Democrat, he played a leading
part in all significant political watersheds while never taking a major
political initiative. Few of Italy's contentious issues left him
untainted, from those surrounding the construction of Rome's Fiumicino
airport, which opened in 1961; to the murky banking scandals of Roberto
Calvi, found hanging under Blackfriars bridge, London, in June 1982; and
Michele Sindona, found poisoned in his cell in 1986 while serving a
life sentence for murder.
Magistrates asked parliament 27 times
for permission to investigate Andreotti, and 27 times parliament
rejected the request. Yet he was never directly implicated, let alone
indicted, in the most significant of them all, the mother of all
scandals, the great Tangentopoli ("bribesville") affair of the 1990s
that brought down the Christian Democratic party along with the other
four parties that made up almost all the governments of the First
Republic. Andreotti's personality and, above all, his innermost
political convictions, remained shrouded in mystery – an extraordinary
achievement for someone so frequently in the public eye, so often
investigated by the press and magistrates, so often interviewed, and so
prolific a writer.
This most powerful of men lived modestly with
his wife, Livia, whom he had married in 1945, and with whom he had two
sons and two daughters. Andreotti, who had interceded on behalf of
endless supplicants like a true
padrino (godfather), did not use his power to pursue personal wealth or to enhance the prospects of his closest relatives.
He
had a slight malformation of the spine that gave him a stooping gait,
which was used by caricaturists to represent him as a malevolent,
hunchbacked dwarf (he was actually quite tall) with disproportionately
large ears, always dressed in black, lurking in the dark corners of the
republic, holding the strings of the political puppet show that unfolded
year after year.
He was born in Rome. His father died when Giulio
was two, and the family survived on his mother's miserly widow's
pension. While at university, he joined the Federation of Italian
University Catholic Students and became its president in February 1942.
This enabled him to meet and befriend many of the personalities who
would dominate post-fascist Italy. Andreotti obtained a first-class law
degree from the University of Rome in 1941, specialising in
ecclesiastical law. His frail physique prevented him from being drafted,
but not from spending most of the second world war establishing a
formidable network of connections and making friends of differing
political hues. In the dying days of the fascist regime, Andreotti
cultivated the entire Catholic establishment vigorously, especially
those notables who had spent the years of fascism lying low, waiting for
a change of fortune.
Having secured his rear, he set about
energetically organising the new generation of Catholic intellectuals
and politicians in 1944, at the age of 25, he became a member of the
national council of the newly founded Christian Democrats. In 1946 he
was elected to the assembly as one of the representatives for Rome. He
was subsequently elected in all parliamentary elections until 1991 when
he was appointed life senator (one of the five such posts in the gift of
the president of the republic).
His control over the Christian
Democratic party machine in Rome and beyond was overwhelming. He was
widely regarded by the higher echelons of the civil service to be
"their" man. He also had the trust of the Vatican, and Rome's most
prominent property and banking interests. One of the results of this
meticulous and painstaking accumulation of power was that he was usually
able to top the chart of personal preference votes at all elections
(under the old electoral system, voters could indicate, after voting for
a party, which of the candidates on the list they preferred).
In
1947 De Gasperi appointed him undersecretary to the presidency of the
council. This non-cabinet post – equivalent to a minister without
portfolio – enabled him to be at the centre of all government
activities. He was, in effect, the prime minister's main fixer. However,
he was also given a practical task: the reorganisation of the cinema
industry. Andreotti piloted through parliament legislation giving the
government greater power over the economy, which helped the industry
to produce, by 1954, some 200 films a year, making Italy the largest
producer of films in the world after the US.
His uninhibited
attitude towards artistic production contrasted sharply with that of his
more traditionalist colleagues: "More legs and fewer rags," he intoned
as he censored Vittorio De Sica's 1952 film Umberto D, the dismal story
of a struggling pensioner. His wishes were fulfilled as the industry
prudently moved away from the sombre neo-realism of the immediate
postwar years towards mildly saucy comedies and the sub-De Mille-style
epics, set in antiquity with their cast of thousands of buxom Roman
ladies. This relaxed pragmatism became his trademark. It permitted him
to shift from the left to the right and back again without anyone being
particularly surprised.
In 1954, after the death of De Gasperi,
Andreotti became his own man, organised his own supporters and became
home secretary interior minister in the first of the many governments
led by
Amintore Fanfani.
Between 1955 and 1958 he was minister of finance, then minister of
defence, holding this post from 1959 to 1966 – unmoved and unmoveable –
while prime ministers succeeded each other: Antonio Segni (1959),
Fernando Tambroni (1960), Fanfani (1960-62), Giovanni Leone (1963) and
Aldo Moro (1963-66).
He then moved on to the industry ministry
(1966-68). Out of government between 1968 and 1972, he "missed" (by luck
or supreme cunning) the dying days of the first centre-left government,
the student revolt, the rebirth of working-class militancy (the hot
autumn of 1969) and the first wave of terrorism. Yet he was far from
idle. As leader of the Christian Democrat parliamentary group, he played
a leading and mediating role in the incessant factional party
infighting.
In the early 1960s he was a pillar of the party's
right, whose main objective was to prevent the formation of a coalition
government with the Socialist party – the
centro-sinistra (centre-left).
At the last minute, the swift-footed Andreotti switched his support and
rallied round Moro and Fanfani, the architects of the new coalition
whose aim was to reform the country while isolating the communists.
Andreotti
had thrown his weight behind the new centre-left coalition in 1963 only
after ascertaining that it was acceptable to those whose assent he
regarded as crucial: the US and the Vatican. He knew them well.
As minister of defence, Andreotti was the politician closest to the
Americans. As a personal friend of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini,
who was about to become pope as Paul VI, he was intimately acquainted
with Vatican thinking. Andreotti backed novelties only after he had
secured the maximum consensus.
For some, politics is the art of
bold decisions, striving forward, changing the landscape and making a
difference. But for Andreotti, politics was about caution and prudence.
It was the art of managing human affairs in an imperfect world. People
were fallible and corrupt, flawed and sinful, and one had to accept them
as they were. They might be changed by divine intervention, but not by
human intercession.
This attitude enabled this genuinely religious
man, who went to mass every day and to confession every week, to behave
with what may appear as unchecked cynicism. His most celebrated
aphorism was his response to a journalist who wondered whether Christian
Democrats would ever be weary of wielding power: "Political power wears
out only those who haven't got it."
By 1972 the Socialist party
had withdrawn its support from the government, and the centre-left
coalition came to an end. A period of great political uncertainty
unfolded. Without the socialists, it was extremely difficult to form a
stable government – even by Italian standards. Andreotti emerged as
prime minister (1972-73), leading a weak coalition of the centre-right,
thus consolidating his image as a conservative scourge of the left,
whether communist or socialist.
That was a time of great changes:
the end of the long postwar boom, the oil crisis and the termination
of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Italy, a country
with few energy resources and a weak currency, reeled under the impact.
Terrorism escalated, as did organised crime. But it was also a time of
rapid modernisation. Workers and women gained new rights, divorce was
legalised, central power was devolved. Andreotti's "rightwing"
government did not forcefully oppose these changes. In practice, it
facilitated them.
The Communist party made great electoral gains
in 1975 and 1976, and called for a "historic compromise" with the
Christian Democrats. Moro, now de facto party leader, had come to the
conclusion that a deal with the communists was inevitable. It was
necessary to proceed gradually. First the communists would be "allowed"
to support a Christian Democrat government in parliament, then they
would have a major say in its programme, and, eventually, in the
fullness of time – after a lengthy apprenticeship, once it had become
apparent that they were not bloodthirsty Stalinists but quite reasonable
social democrats – they would be brought into government.
For
this to succeed, it was indispensable to have a prime minister who would
reassure the Vatican, the Americans, the European community, big and
small business and Italy's vast bureaucracy. Who better than Andreotti
to perform this delicate balancing act? He loyally accepted and led the
government from 1976 to 1979.
However, Moro's kidnapping and
assassination by the Red Brigades in 1978 caused such a momentous
political crisis that the compromise did not survive, though Andreotti
did. He used one of his rare absences from government (1979-83) to forge
a new alliance with the staunchly anti-communist socialist leader
Bettino Craxi
and those Christian Democrats who, unlike him, had been hostile
to an entente with the communists. When Craxi became prime minister
in 1983, Andreotti was back in government as foreign minister,
holding the post until 1989. And then, for the seventh and last time, he
became prime minister.
Like many before him, Craxi had failed to
modernise the country, and during his premiership, moral standards in
the conduct of public affairs degenerated further. Andreotti appeared to
take less and less interest in domestic matters. This became more
evident when, having regained the office of prime minister (1989-92),
he repositioned Italy's role in international affairs, enthusiastically
supporting Mikhail Gorbachev's programme of perestroika (energetically
backed by
Pope John Paul II),
distancing himself a little from the US (he thought, quite rightly,
that Washington had never been able or willing to understand Italian
political problems), while remaining staunchly pro-European. He played
a key role in the Maastricht treaty (1992), particularly in obtaining
Margaret Thatcher's
endorsement – no mean feat. As he said, much later: "Mrs Thatcher is a
woman of great intelligence … but she has an authoritarian disposition.
It is not easy to sit around a table with her."
By 1992 the tocsin
bell was ringing for the unlamented First Republic. Andreotti appeared
to survive unscathed from the corruption investigations of the
Tangentopoli affair, but the past was catching up with him. In March of
that year, his righthand man in Sicily, Salvo Lima, was murdered by the
mafia in what was seen as an internecine dispute (Lima was also the link
between Andreotti and the mafia). Andreotti was later accused by
Tommaso Buscetta, a mafia supergrass, of having been involved with
organised crime, and of having exchanged a ritual kiss with the
capo di tutti i capi (boss
of all bosses), Salvatore Riina. The kiss was an unlikely story, but
the Palermo court investigating his links with the mafia did accept that
such links had existed, but only until 1980, and that he could no
longer be prosecuted – not quite the vindication he had hoped for.
That
Andreotti had had links with the mafia did not surprise anyone, but his
last administration was more decisively anti-mafia than any other
postwar Italian government. Much of the credit goes, of course, to brave
investigative magistrates such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo
Borsellino, who were both murdered in 1992, but Andreotti too moved
firmly against Cosa Nostra. More powers were granted to the police.
Co-ordination between the various anti-mafia police "pools" improved.
Mafiosi were kept in jail pending appeal (a departure from previous
practice). Bidding for public contracts – a traditional source of
revenue for the Sicilian and Neapolitan mafia – was made more
transparent. Indeed, the murder of Lima was widely regarded as a mafia
revenge for Andreotti's decision to call off the pact of mutual
tolerance he appeared to have with Cosa Nostra, another instance,
claimed his opponents, of his amazing duplicity.
Andreotti was
also accused of having ordered the murder of a rightwing journalist,
Carmine Pecorelli, in 1979. Pecorelli was the editor of a
small-circulation newspaper, allegedly close to the secret services and
specialising in scandal-mongering and blackmail. He had, or so it was
said, some evidence that both the "secret services" (ie the CIA) and
Andreotti had been connected with the killing of Moro – one of the many
groundless conspiracy theories that have entertained Italians over the
years. The Pecorelli affair lasted, incredibly, for more than 20 years.
The connection between Pecorelli and Andreotti was never established,
but in 1996 the prosecutors thought they had enough evidence to indict
Andreotti.
This time parliament could not protect him and he was
brought before the court, along with various neo-fascists and mafiosi.
In 1999 the court ruled he was not guilty. In 2002 the court of appeal
overturned the verdict and condemned Andreotti to 24 years in jail. He
took it philosophically: "To give 24 years to a man who is over 80 is
almost like wishing him a long life." Finally, in 2003, the court of
cassation (Corte Suprema di Cassazione), the country's court of last
resort, overturned the sentence. Once again Andreotti was innocent – at
least of this particular crime, thus vindicating those who argued that
it was hardly credible that a statesman of Andreotti's standing would
risk so much to eliminate a rather pathetic blackmailer.
Until the
long and exhausting trial got under way, Andreotti had remained in the
international limelight, esteemed and revered. In 1995, invited by
Yasser Arafat, he went to Gaza, part of a wider Middle Eastern tour that
included Iran, Israel and Syria, and was received with honours normally
reserved for a head of state and not to a retired politician facing
criminal charges. Gorbachev, after his resignation, sent him an effusive
letter, praising him as one of the greatest living international
statesmen. Henry Kissinger celebrated Andreotti's "razor-sharp political
mind". Few Italian politicians had obtained such international
recognition.
Yet these were also the years in which he was being
indicted as a mafioso. Those who were incredulous that Andreotti would
stoop so low were reminded that his realism might have led him to treat
the mafia as he treated anyone who had power – as opponents to be taken
seriously, whose interests must be taken on board, and who, if they
cannot be eliminated, must be conciliated. He had, after all,
consistently exhibited a supreme indifference to the idea of supping
with the enemy, and invariably displayed a lack of anger, passion or any
desire of revenge.
These traits were well depicted in Il Divo,
directed by Paolo Sorrentino, which narrates the events surrounding
Andreotti's trials and tribulations of 1991-92. It is said that
Andreotti, when watching it, momentarily lost his temper, then admitted
that the film was aesthetically remarkable, but that the suggestion that
he was somehow responsible for many of the "illustrious corpses" of the
First Republic was ludicrous – a fair reaction.
He is survived by Livia and his four children.
• Giulio Andreotti, politician and writer, born 14 January 1919; died 6 May 2013
The Guardian, 6 maggio 2013
Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954), fondatore della Democrazia cristiana e presidente del Consiglio dal 1945 al 1953
Palmiro Togliatti (Genova, 1893-Yalta, 1964), segretario del Pci dal 1938 alla morte
