Forlani, a lifetime of building alliances in the era of the First Republic – Corriere.it

It was the watershed between the First and Second Republics, which was not born in 1994 with Silvio Berlusconi’s electoral victory but in 1992, when Arnaldo Forlani – targeted by snipers – decided to withdraw from the race for the Quirinale. It was the end of an era that would experience a long agony, between judicial investigations, attacks, technical governments, fears of coups and the unraveling of the parties protagonists of the national rebirth after fascism. If Forlani had become president of the Republic, the history of Italy would have been different, or at least that is what the followers of the Christian Democrats still claim today, witnesses of the handover. In reality, the very failure of that candidacy for Colle emblematically represented the collapse of a system with no more glue.

With the collapse of the party-state of the DC they would come down the others too. Allies and adversaries. Forlani had understood this in time, since the Berlin Wall had fallen. But unlike Francesco Cossiga, who from the Quirinal announced the end of a world with millenarian tones, he preferred periphrases, those concepts within which he watered down his thoughts and controversies. Once he resisted for an hour the questions of the reporters who asked him about Cossiga’s pickaxes, until a voice rose from the group: «Honor ‘but he’s not telling us a f…». And he seraphic: «If you want, I can go on». It was never understood whether it was a “were-rabbit” or a “sleeping tiger”, which were his nicknames. But one thing is certain: Forlani, together with Ciriaco De Mita, should be studied by self-styled contemporary leaders. Because, when the parties were forces of militant masses and not personal assets, those two young Christian Democrat scions knew how to throw off the pedestal none other than Amintore Fanfani, of whom Forlani had been a collaborator. The pact of San Ginesio of 1969 not only recalls how they conquered power in the DC: it is the testimony of how politics was done. And «Arnaldo» had begun to study politics in 1948. And from Pesaro he had arrived as far as Rome.

He was party secretary, prime minister, several times minister. Then, a step away from the Quirinale, he fell. And it was the “everyone down to earth”. Tenacious opponent of the season of national solidarity and dialogue with the PCI, he forged a close relationship with Bettino Craxi and the socialists, when even Scalfaro was on this line with him. He must have liked the word “preamble.” He used it in the 1970s to forge local agreements with his center-left allies and then in the 1980s to forge agreements between Christian Democrat currents and take back Piazza del Gesu. He went through the epic of the economic boom and Italy’s entry into the G7, but — at Palazzo Chigi – he stumbled over the P2 lists, which remained closed in the drawer for a long, too long time before being made known. Although he has lived through various periods of “Lent”, imposed on him by Fanfani, he has always risen.

Like Giulio Andreotti. With the «star» and with Craxi they were the three-pronged attack of the last season before Armageddon. Indeed, it was precisely the breakup of the CAF (acronym of the three surnames) that signaled the credits. By now the political battles had become mere power struggles, the currents only pumped cards, more money circulated than ideas. Politics cost money. And America no longer needed Italy to guard the Iron Curtain. Thus it was that an entire ruling class was brought to justice. Just as the judiciary had improperly become power through the responsibility of the Parliament itself which had abolished the constitutional guarantees. Forlani knew the pillory of the trial, the interrogation of Antonio Di Pietro, the television images that portrayed him with drool, the conviction in the Enimont case for illegal financing, the delivery to social services. It was game over. Although he did not present himself in the 1994 elections, as a representative of the moderate area he seconded the initiative of Pier Ferdinando Casini to ally himself with Berlusconi. Since then he has reduced his public outings and in recent years he has lived in the dark, only of memories. Those of an old school, the DC, which has produced politicians.

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