Giulio Andreotti, Premier of Italy 7 Times, Dies at 94
Published: May 6, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
Mr. Andreotti’s reputation was sullied again in his later years, when he was put on trial twice. Informers said that he had colluded with the Mafia in exchange for electoral support, and implicated him in the killing of a muckraking Italian journalist. He was acquitted in both trials.
Mr. Andreotti maintained strong ties with the Vatican, having had a hand in rewriting its 1929 agreement with Mussolini. In 1976, as prime minister, Mr. Andreotti presented to Parliament an updated version of the accord, bringing it into line with the secular lives led by most Italians: it abolished Roman Catholicism as the state religion, made religious instruction in public schools optional and removed the church’s ban of Italy’s six-year-old divorce law.
The accord was finally ratified in 1984 under Bettino Craxi, Italy’s first Socialist prime minister, whom Mr. Andreotti was serving as foreign minister.
Mr. Andreotti was also prime minister when Parliament, after years of arguments and compromises, passed a liberal abortion law in 1978 despite Vatican opposition and only lax support from his Christian Democrats. Three years later, the electorate voted by better than two to one to uphold the law.
He could be shrewd and pragmatic. Though he started out as a staunch anti-Communist, Mr. Andreotti was the first prime minister to find an accommodation with the Italian Communist Party, the country’s second-strongest electoral force.
The compromise, engineered in 1976, ostensibly gave the Communist Party a role in policy making in return for a promise not to trip up the government in votes of confidence. Ignoring the outcries of its rank and file, the Communists helped Mr. Andreotti pass painful austerity measures that kept the country from drowning in debt.
In the end, it was the Communists who called off the engagement. The break came in December 1978, with Mr. Andreotti’s decision to take Italy into the European monetary system. He wheedled concessions out of Germany and France for a weaker lira and put his proposal to a vote.
As foreseen, the Communists cast their first nays on a substantive issue. But the Socialists abstained rather than derail the government, and that left a comfortable margin for membership in the monetary system. Thus Mr. Andreotti won an impressive gamble.
The Communists caused his fall a month later on a vote of confidence.
Giulio Andreotti was born on Jan. 14, 1919, to a teacher who died when he was a year old. After growing up in Rome in modest circumstances, he worked his way through the University of Rome and earned a law degree. From 1942 to 1945, he presided over the Italian Catholic University Federation, a student organization, and edited its weekly.
While doing research at the Vatican in 1942, he met De Gasperi, an anti-Fascist who had found refuge there as a librarian and hoped to resuscitate the Christian Democratic Party when Mussolini had passed from the scene. De Gasperi led eight successive cabinets from 1945 to 1953, and Mr. Andreotti served him as under secretary of state, a post with considerable influence.
Mr. Andreotti is survived by his wife, Livia Danese, and four children.
He was the author of numerous books, including “Lives: Encounters With History Makers,” published in 1989.
After the fall of Communism, Mr. Andreotti spent six months in 1990 as the president of the European Community, working to improve relations with the new democracies of the former Soviet bloc, to establish a European Central Bank and to keep world trade from becoming mired in protectionism.
He raised eyebrows in Paris and London by saying out loud what others had said only privately: that France and Britain should accept their diminished power and yield their permanent United Nations Security Council seats to the European Community and Japan.
The events that tested Mr. Andreotti most in his later years began to unfold in late 1992, when charges resurfaced that he had for years been the Sicilian Mafia’s protector in Rome in exchange for political support. One said that Mr. Andreotti had met with Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the “boss of all bosses,” in 1987 and the men had exchanged a kiss of respect.
Other accusations centered on allegations that Mr. Andreotti had conspired in the killing of an investigative journalist, Carmine Pecorelli, in March 1979.
After Parliament stripped Mr. Andreotti of his immunity in 1993, he was tried in Palermo, Sicily, in 1995, on charges of associating with the Mafia, and in Perugia in 1996 on charges of conspiring in the killing of the journalist. (The Palermo trial was adjourned pending a verdict in Perugia.)
Mr. Andreotti was acquitted in Perugia in 1999. That same year, he was acquitted in Palermo on the basis of insufficient evidence, not quite the exoneration he had hoped for.
Mr. Andreotti repeatedly questioned the motives and reliability of the informers, suggesting the Mafia was getting back at him for his efforts to fight organized crime.
“As far as I know, none of the informers has ever said anything that they knew directly,” he told The New York Times in January 1993. “They always say, ‘I heard about it.’ And the people they cite are all dead.”
Praised for his political durability, Mr. Andreotti was also labeled “Beelzebub” for his secretive dealings. Others called him the “Divo Giulio,” a play on his first name and the Latin “Divus Iulius” (or Divine Julius), used for Julius Caesar.
His political career inspired biographies and an unflattering movie that gave him a dismal place in Italian history. The film, “Il Divo,” by Paolo Sorrentino, won the Jury Prize at theCannes Film Festival in 2008.
Asked for his reaction to the film, Mr. Andreotti told the Italian news media, “If you are a politician, I hear it’s better to be criticized than ignored.”
No comments:
Post a Comment