Giulio Andreotti

Giulio Andreotti was born on January 14, 1919, in Rome. He served as Prime Minister of Italy seven times between 1972 and 1992, more than any other postwar Italian leader, and was the preeminent figure of the Democrazia Cristiana party's right wing for four decades. Known as "Il Divo" and "Il Gobbo" (the Hunchback), he was a master of the opaque center of Italian power who simultaneously wielded institutional authority, intelligence connections, and political longevity of a kind unique in Western European democracy. He died in Rome on May 6, 2013.¹

Political Career

Andreotti entered national politics as a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi in the immediate postwar period, serving as a government minister continuously from 1947 onward - a record of executive participation without parallel in Italian republican history. He served as Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister, and was a Senator for Life after 1991.

His political method was characterized by extreme patience, deliberate ambiguity, and the cultivation of relationships across the full spectrum of Italian power including elements that were formally outside or opposed to legal norms. The Italian political scientist Giorgio Galli described him as the personification of the "parallel state" that operated alongside and within Italy's visible institutions.¹

The Moro Kidnapping

As Prime Minister in March-May 1978, Andreotti faced the Red Brigades kidnapping of Aldo Moro, who had been Andreotti's political patron and was traveling to parliament that morning to present the new Andreotti government - whose formation had required PCI agreement, the practical realization of the "historic compromise." Andreotti's government maintained an absolute refusal to negotiate for Moro's release, a position that held despite Moro's letters pleading for negotiation and despite the advocacy of the Socialists under Bettino Craxi.

The refusal was justified as a constitutional principle that the state could not bargain with terrorists. Critics then and since have noted that Andreotti had strong personal and political reasons to prefer Moro's death to his release: Moro was the DC's most credible voice for engagement with the PCI under Enrico Berlinguer, and his captivity letters, which grew increasingly critical of DC colleagues, would have been devastating to party cohesion if Moro had survived to develop them into public statements.²

Gladio Disclosure

On October 24, 1990, in response to questioning by magistrate Felice Casson and parliamentary demands following Casson's discovery of the Gladio documentation, Andreotti - serving as Prime Minister for the sixth time - confirmed to the Italian Parliament that a secret NATO stay-behind network had existed in Italy since 1956. His disclosure, carefully calibrated to acknowledge the network's existence while limiting information about its political operations, triggered the parliamentary and European investigations that followed.²

Mafia Trial

In 1993, Andreotti was indicted for association with the Mafia and for ordering the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had been shot in 1979 after publishing material damaging to Andreotti from the Moro kidnapping files. The trials, which lasted eight years, produced acquittals but also judicial findings describing documented contacts between Andreotti and Sicilian Mafia figures including Salvo Lima, who was himself murdered by the Mafia in 1992.

The Court of Cassation's final ruling acquitted Andreotti of the murder charge and found that his Mafia associations, while real, had predated 1980 and could not be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations - a finding that established the historical reality of the associations while precluding criminal punishment.¹