Introduction

This book deals with major events that occured within the Italian party political system between 1976 and 1991. It explains an account of the tumult of the last three years. The governing parties' complacency was nearly, but not quite, justified. The ex-communists' vote did collapse in the 1992 elections, but so did that of the Christian Democrats. Italian politics in the 1980s was a grotesque exaggeration of traditional democracy, Italian style. Where once politicians asked millions of lire as reward for their role in approving contracts for public works, in the 1980s the ruling parties initiated pharaonic public works of little or no public utility and asked for billions of lire, or hundreds of billions, in bribes. The parties, especially the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, were rightly seen as the enemies of good government and were punished.