Giorgio Napolitano: lights and shadows of a President
The disappearance of the former President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano it inevitably brings with it a mix of lights and shadows that are inextricably linked to each other and it will be the task of future historians to analyze its consequences on the civil life of the country.
With Napolitano the “last of the communists” disappears but also – and perhaps above all – “the first of the reformists” or rather of the “meliorists”, as they were called then.
A man from the last century disappears, with his legacy of ideologies but also of composure and institutional authority, someone defined him as “a lord of politics”.
The first President of the Republic to have two consecutive mandates, a practice that was later also followed by Sergio Mattarella.
Born in Naples in 1925 into an upper middle class environment, his mother was noble and his father was a liberal lawyer.
He graduated from classical high school during the war and in 1942 began university in Naples, at Federico II.
He does not shy away from the “spirit of the time” (like Pietro Ingrao) and like many communists he is part of the GUF, the fascist university group. His passion for theater dominates his cultural interests and he even gets small parts.
In 1944 he was already in contact with the Neapolitan communists and in 1945 he formally joined the Italian Communist Party.
In 1947 he graduated in law with a thesis with the significant title of “The lack of industrial development of the South after the Unification and the special law for Naples of 1904”.
In 1953 he was a Deputy and from then on he would always be reconfirmed until 1996.
He deals with the South for the PCI Central Committee of which he is a member thanks to the precise will of the secretary Palmiro Togliatti who was carrying out a policy of renewal of the ruling class.
In 1956 the events of Hungary and the PCI took place and above all the Unity openly sided with the Soviets who had invaded Budapest to quell the workers’ revolts.
The party newspaper went so far as to define the insurgents as “hooligans and despicable provocateurs”.
Napolitano at that juncture is completely on Togliatti’s linepraising the Soviet repression and ferociously attacking those in the party who dissented.
This strengthened him enormously in the PCI thanks to the trust of Migliore.
From this hard and pure, indeed intransigent, position, however, an evolutionary path will start which will materialize after the disappearance of Togliatti and Stalinism.
In fact, we find him aligned with the reformist moderates who look carefully at the Italian Socialist Party.
This vocation would then materialize in the creation of a “right” within the PCI at the end of the 1960s, marked by the influence of Giorgio Amendola and the values of democratic socialism.
We move from opposition to capitalism to its reform, betraying the Marxist dictate and proving inadequate.
At the same time Napolitano works to increase the “Europeanism rate” of the PCI at a time in which – the 70s – the contrast between the two blocks became harsh. It was the period of the Cold War and Berlinguer also significantly said later that he felt “safer under the NATO umbrella”.
Attacks the communist secretary from the “right” contesting his still too vehement opposition to capitalism, looking with interest at Bettino Craxi’s PSI with whom he begins to entertain a political and human dialogue.
He speaks of “European reformism”, further worrying Moscow of which he had previously been the main contact in Italy. In the party he leads the important Foreign Affairs Commission which allows him to declare full “solidarity with the USA and NATO”.
A statement that can be made thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s contemporary appearance on the world political scene which would soon destroy the Soviet Union and lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, in 1975 Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State in the administration of Gerald Ford (who took over from Richard Nixon), denied him a visa to hold conferences at some prestigious US universities – including Yale, Harvard and Princeton – which had invited him.
Official documents – with a personal note from US Ambassador John Volpe – later revealed that the granting of the visa “would be interpreted as a sort of alleged indication that the American government has accepted the democratic credentials of the PCI.”
In 1978, thanks to the new Democratic President Jimmy Carter, he managed to reach the States on an official visit, the first PCI leader to accomplish the feat, thanks to the new government of Giulio Andreotti which had external support from the PCI. The kidnapping of the President of the Christian Democracy Aldo Moro, as is known, prevented the vote of confidence.
In 1992 he began to reap the fruits of his Atlanticism by becoming President of the Chamber, replacing Oscar Luigi Scalfaro who in turn became President of the Republic.
In 1993 an emblematic episode: the Guardia di Finanza, in the midst of Tangentopoli, tried to enter the Chamber to obtain documents, namely the budgets of the parties. A symbolic magistrate of that period, Gherardo Colombo, requests it. Napolitano opposes him with venue immunity which guarantees the inviolability of Parliament to the public force.
In 1993 he modified the rules of the Chamber to allow an open vote on the authorizations to proceed, a rule that Bettino Craxi had previously saved thanks to the secret vote, marking the break with the socialist leader.
Craxi reciprocated with a famous torpedo in an equally famous speech:
«how can we believe that the President of the Chamber, the Honorable Giorgio Napolitano, who was Foreign Minister of the PCI for many years and had relations with the entire communist nomenklatura of the East starting from the Soviet one, had never noticed the great traffic that did it happen under him, between the various representatives and administrators of the PCI and the Eastern countries? Did he never notice?”
He was Minister of the Interior in the Prodi government of 1996, becoming the first ex-communist to hold that strategic role of controlling public order.
He obtained his first mandate as President of the Republic on 10 May 2006, in the fourth vote.
The second mandate was on 20 April 2013, following the stalemate after the political elections. On 14 January 2015 he resigned and returned to Parliament as a Senator for life and would then be replaced by Sergio Mattarella.
As President of the Republic Napolitano inaugurated a dirigiste dimension that only the Christian Democrats Scalfaro and Cossiga had previously shown. It was not for nothing that he was called “King George” and represented on the covers complete with crown and scepter.
We also remember the long conflict with the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office which will mark an unprecedented institutional event with a conflict between the powers of the State.
Ultimately, what is your opinion on Napolitano? The right sees him with smoke and mirrors due to his dirigiste past and his having essentially remained a communist beyond certain choices within his party and above all at an institutional level.
Giorgia Meloni – who yesterday wrote a concise statement of condolences – called him “a traitor”.
Francesco Storace was accused of “contempt against the Head of State” and was later acquitted.
We remember his initial excellent relationship with Silvio Berlusconi which then foundered when he replaced him with Mario Monti to stem the spread with which the “Atlantic” reminded Italy who was really in charge.
On the left it is instead considered an icon. He was undoubtedly a shrewd player bordering on opportunism when he switched from the pro-Soviet, far-left line to the right-wing Atlantic one after the disappearance of Togliatti, something that Craxi did not fail to dispute.
He understood before the others that communism was over and anticipated Gorbachev’s turning point. He was therefore a de facto socialist who, however, never wanted to recognize the PSI as its primogeniture, undoubtedly sinning hubris.
If he was politically unscrupulous, institutionally he was a President who was very attentive to practice even at the cost of becoming meticulous in the so-called State – Mafia negotiation, raised by the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office.
In an era of institutional disintegration and crumbling, he held firm at the helm of the Quirinale even at the cost of some institutional forcing, but it was what the people were asking for in a period of epochal social upheavals in which a strong figure of reference is essential to guarantee the stability.
He was therefore an “alpha President”, we could define him with modern terminology.
He remains a figure from another era in a world that has completely changed in almost a century of life.
Its lights and shadows alternate in a continuous cyclical pattern and only subsequent historical analysis will be able to return a complete picture of its political and above all institutional, but also human balance sheet.
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