Ruini ruins Scalfaro
That time Scalfaro asked Ruini for help to overthrow Berlusconi. Damato's Graffi published in the newspaper Libero
Unmissable is the interview in which Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who turned 93 in February, told Corriere della Sera sensational passages from his long experience – from 1991 to 2007 – as president of the Italian episcopal conference, between the first and second Republic.
It fell to him, for example, to take up the request of the very secular president of the Senate Giovanni Spadolini to dissuade his Christian Democrat friends, who in 1981 had sent him to Palazzo Chigi, three years before Bettino Craxi arrived there, from the decision to renounce the lucky, second him, the name of their party to return to the now too distant Sturzian one of the Italian People's Party.
Poor Ruini, who agreed with the reading of a historian of the highest quality like his interlocutor, tried but in vain, not even predicting Mino Martinazzoli, the last secretary of the DC, no more than 15 percent of the votes , one less than what he would then have received in the 1994 polls, resigning immediately. The results of which surprisingly brought the novice politician Silvio Berlusconi directly to the helm of the government, overtaking even the "joyful war machine" set up on the left by Achille Occhetto.
I don't know if Cardinal Ruini was also surprised by Berlusconi's victory, like Occhetto and Martinazzoli then on different fronts, not yet assembled, but certainly not alarmed. “I think that Berlusconi – the very high prelate said to Francesco Verderami – has shown his strengths and limitations, like all other politicians, but that he has not had subversive purposes in any way. If anything, the dangers for the Republic were different." As they are, I think, even today when the left is repeating against the Meloni government the campaign conducted at the time against those who dared to defeat it at the dawn of the Second Republic.
Whether surprised or not by the Cavaliere's victory, Cardinal Ruini must have been astonished to feel invited by the then President of the Republic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to do his utmost from his important episcopal position to bring down the first centre-right government.
Invited by the interviewer to say whether really in the summer of 1994, as told in a book published by Corriere della Sera itself, Scalfaro had invited him to dinner with Cardinal Angelo Sodano and Monsignor Jean Louis Tauran to ask them to be "helped to bring down the Berlusconi government" receiving an "embarrassed silence", Ruini replied verbatim: "Indeed it went like this. Our decision to oppose what appeared to us to be a maneuver – beyond Scalfaro's good faith – was unanimous." Maneuver attempted by Scalfaro also with Umberto Rossi, as told by the Northern League leader himself who was still an ally of Berlusconi, and succeeded. In fact Bossi provoked the crisis within the year, protected by Scalfaro's guarantee that there would be no quickly snap elections.
“And to think – Ruini continued mercilessly – that Scalfaro had been a great friend to me. I remember when De Mita offered him the position of Prime Minister in 1987, in opposition to Craxi and with the benevolence of the PCI. Scalfaro then came to me and told me he would refuse. “It's good,” I replied. And in fact Amintore Fanfani would then go to Palazzo Chigi to manage the early elections strongly desired by the then Christian Democratic secretary.
It was that refusal that five years later earned Scalfaro, still fresh from his election as President of the Chamber, Craxi's fiduciary support for his election as Head of State in the political and institutional emergency created by Capaci's mafia attack on Giovanni Falcone . But, once at the Quirinale, in addition to denying him the role of Prime Minister, Scalfaro did not respond to the letters with which Craxi pointed out his "unparalleled severity" – to repeat an expression of Giorgio Napolitano after many years at the Quirinale – practiced on him by the “Clean Hands” judiciary.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ruini-ruina-scalfaro/ on Mon, 17 Jun 2024 07:54:34 +0000.