Thirty years later

"And yet, on the other hand, what needs to be said, and what everyone knows, is that much of the political funding is irregular or illegal. Parties, especially those that rely on large, medium or small segments, newspapers, propaganda, promotional and associative activities, and with them many and various operational political structures, have recourse and resort to the use of additional resources in an irregular or illegal form.
If much of this matter is to be considered purely criminal, then much of the system would be a criminal system.
I do not believe that there is anyone in this Chamber, the political leader of important organizations, who can stand up and take an oath in the opposite direction to what I am saying: sooner or later the facts would undertake to declare him perjury ". Thus on July 3, 1992, Bettino Craxi, historical leader of the PSI and former president of the Council of Ministers in the years 1983-1987, described in parliament the structure of public funding for parties a few months after the start of Clean Hands.

It all began on February 17 of that year with the arrest of Mario Chiesa, when the then president of Pio Albergo Trivulzio was arrested in the act of committing a crime while receiving a bribe from a cleaning contractor to facilitate the victory of a contract. A few weeks later, Craxi himself belittled the case by defining Chiesa a "rogue", a criminal, an element completely foreign to the Milanese PSI.
But things turned out differently. The investigations by the Milan prosecutor's office, started by Antonio di Pietro, went on and, after the 1992 elections, the first warranties arrived announcing an investigation of enormous proportions for a pervasive spread of corruption and extortion.

We know how it ended: the progressive fall of the traditional parties and the end of the first republic.
The narrative seems to grant the Clean Hands investigation an essential role in the transformations of our country since 1992: the mother investigation of all changes.
The reality, however, is much more complex. Let's try to ask ourselves some questions. Starting from what Craxi himself said: if the sick financing of the political system had lasted for decades, why did we have Tangentopoli only in 1992? Why in Milan and not in Rome? Why did the other corruption cases uncovered earlier not lead to investigations of this magnitude? Was Tangentopoli really the cause of all subsequent events?

Maybe we need to recalibrate the speech and look at the context. To understand the conditions that allowed the Milan investigation to become Tangentopoli, it is necessary to refer to some previous events.
In particular, in 1989 the fall of the Berlin wall had disruptive effects on Italian politics because it de-legitimized a party system that was based on the east-west / communism-anti-communism opposition, which has now disappeared. Later, in the last years of the presidency (1990-1992), Francesco Cossiga, aware of these changes, with his utterances, said: "I have given the system such pickaxes that it cannot be restored, but must be changed".
Also decisive were the introduction of the single preference in the elections of the Chamber of Deputies (1991) which forced the parties to change their consensus strategies, and the results of the elections of 5 April 1992.

In that electoral round the traditional parties lost over 100 deputies to the benefit of more recent and anti-system political forces such as the Northern League, deeply rooted in the north-east. It is curious but the electoral results should not be read as a consequence of Clean Hands, simply because at the beginning of April the extent of the investigation had not yet emerged: only at the end of the month - that is, with the polls closed - the guarantee notices started in flurry. . The outcome of the elections was rather the cause of the success of Tangentopoli, because the downsizing of traditional parties allowed the investigation to be strengthened precisely in Milan, where new parties such as the League had already dealt a decisive blow to the old system of power. Tangentopoli therefore intervened on a system by now worn out and without consensus in the most economically advanced areas of the country, accelerating a process of replacing a political class that had lost its grip with society and had been unable to self-reform.

Renato Bonomo
NP April 2022