On 28 April 1992 President
Francesco Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term. The reason of his resignation was related to a growing tension between Cossiga and Prime Minister
Giulio Andreotti. This tension emerged in October 1990 when Andreotti revealed the existence of
Gladio, a
stay-behind organization with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Cossiga acknowledged his involvement in the establishment of the organization. Subsequently, in 1991 the
Democratic Party of the Left asked to start a procedure of
impeachment against him (Presidents of Italy can be impeached only for
high treason against the State or for an
attempt to overthrow the
Constitution). Although he threatened to prevent the impeachment procedure by dissolving Parliament, the impeachment request was ultimately dismissed. At the beginning of the 1990s, Italian politics was undergoing a period of instability and growing tensions. In February 1991, the
Northern League, which was first launched as an upgrade of the Northern Alliance in December 1989, was officially transformed into a party through the merger of various regional parties, notably including
Lombard League and
Venetian League, under the leadership of
Umberto Bossi. These continue to exist as "national sections" of the federal party, which presents itself in regional and local contests as "Northern League–Lombard League", "Northern League–Venetian League", "Northern League Piedmont", and so on. The League exploited resentment against the
centralised, Rome-based Italian government (with the famous slogan
Roma ladrona, "Rome (is a) robber"), common in the North as many there felt that the government wasted resources collected mostly from northerners' taxes. Cultural influences from bordering countries in the North and resentment against
illegal immigrants were also exploited. The party's electoral successes began roughly at a time when public disillusionment with the established political parties was at its height. The
Tangentopoli corruption scandals, which invested most of the established parties, were unveiled from 1992 on. it became the fourth largest party of the country and within Parliament. In 1991 the
Italian Communist Party split into the
Democratic Party of the Left, led by
Achille Occhetto, and the
Communist Refoundation Party, headed by
Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the communists since 1988, stunned the party faithfully assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now referred to in Italian politics as the
svolta della Bolognina (Bolognina turning point). The collapse of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had convinced Occhetto that the era of
Eurocommunism was over, and he transformed the Communist Party into a progressive left-wing party, the Democratic Party of the Left. A third of the Communist Party's former members, led by Cossutta, refused to join the PDS, and instead founded the Communist Refoundation Party. On 17 February 1992, judge
Antonio Di Pietro had
Mario Chiesa, a member of the
Italian Socialist Party, arrested for accepting a bribe from a Milan cleaning firm. The
Italian Socialist Party distanced themselves from Chiesa.
Bettino Craxi called Mario Chiesa
mariuolo, or "villain", a "wild splinter" of the otherwise clean PSI. Upset over this treatment by his former colleagues, Chiesa began to give information about corruption implicating his colleagues. This marked the beginning of the
Mani pulite investigation; news of political corruption began spreading in the press. The
1992 general election, held on 5 April that year, marked a huge earthquake for the Italian politics.
Christian Democracy suffered a significant swing against it, but the coalition it had led prior to the elections managed to retain a small majority. Opposition parties won a significant amount of support. The resulting parliament was therefore weak and difficult to bring to an agreement. The so-called "CAF" alliance (the Craxi-Andreotti-Forlani axis), a pact to revive the
Pentapartito coalition—the scheme was conceived in 1991 to allow
Giulio Andreotti to become the next President of the Italian Republic and
Bettino Craxi to become the next Prime Minister—had been heavily crushed by the popular vote. In this context, the
Italian Parliament convened to elect the new president on 13 May 1992. As the count progressed no candidate was able to emerge, not even
Giulio Andreotti whose candidacy was soon made to sink, and the voting process ended up in a real political deadlock. While the count was still ongoing, on 23 May 1992 the popular anti-Mafia magistrate
Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police escort agents were killed by a bomb put on the
Highway A29 by the
Sicilian mafia near
Capaci. The huge wave of public indignation and anger for this crime forced the Parliament to quickly elect a new president and solve the political deadlock. On 25 May 1992, the President of the Chamber of Deputies
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, seen as a man above the parts and as a true defender of the republican institutions, was finally elected president and officially sworn in on 28 May 1992. ==Results==