ABSTRACT
This chapter discovers the sea-change that has taken place in Italian politics. In terms of the presidency, the disintegration of the old parties considerably raised the political profile of the office and it has placed the possibility of a permanent change in the role of the presidency more firmly on the agenda of Italian politics than at any time since the Second World War. There is no escaping the fact that there is a widespread feeling of disappointment with the results of Italy’s period of party-system change. Yet disappointment with the outcome of Italy’s period of change is not really justified since Italian democracy is healthier than most observers have been willing to admit. In the post-war period to the end of the 1980s, the great paradox of Italian politics was that overall political stability was guaranteed precisely by the existence of two such all-embracing and implacably opposed subcultures as the Catholic and the Marxist.
