Bettino Craxi

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Bettino Craxi

Bettino Craxi ( pronunciation ^{? / I} ) (actually Benedetto Craxi , born February 24, 1934 in Milan , † January 19, 2000 in Hammamet , Tunisia ) was an Italian politician ( PSI ). From 1983 to 1987 he was Prime Minister of his country.

Life

Craxi became a member of the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) in 1953 . He broke off his history studies and became politically active at an early age. From 1960 to 1970 he was a councilor in Milan. He was considered a young reformer ("Young Turk") promoted by Pietro Nenni , and in 1965 he became party secretary of the PSI in Lombardy , a position that he resigned in 1968 when he became a member of the Chamber of Deputies .

Craxi provided logistical support to the Spanish Socialist Party PSOE at the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the Czechoslovak politician in exile Jiří Pelikán . The RAI unearthed rare photos of Craxi attempting to lay flowers at Salvador Allende's grave .

Craxi owed his rise in his party not least to the fact that for decades Italian politics mainly revolved around keeping the Partito Comunista Italiano PCI (Communist Party of Italy) out of the government, although cooperation with the various communists in all parties, especially in PSI had supporters and the PCI was the most dynamic of all Italian parties. The Democrazia Cristiana (DC) also had a proponent of the Compromesso storico (historical compromise) in Aldo Moro . After Nennis resigned, his own party, PSI, fell out into different wings and therefore only held a comparatively subordinate position as a junior partner of the Democrazia Cristiana.

General Secretary of PSI

In 1969 Craxi became vice secretary of PSI. As an advocate of reformist socialism, he was promoted to General Secretary of PSI in 1976, an office he held until 1993. The old guard of the party made it possible for the representatives of the currents to rule the party temporarily and expected only an intermezzo from Craxi. Craxi, from 1979 also a member of the European Parliament , tried to reshape the PSI based on the model of the Godesberg program of the German SPD, professed reformism and the market economy , increased the distance between the socialists and the Italian communists and briefly broke the permanent coalition in April 1983 with the DC, removing the stigma of the DC's eternal junior partner. Movie stars and fashion designers became party conference guests.

The result was an increase in votes for Craxi's party at the expense of DC, which had ruled uninterruptedly since 1945. The PSI doubled its share of votes from around 7% at the beginning of the 1980s within a decade. In 1983 he succeeded in claiming the office of Italian Prime Minister for himself. On July 22, 1983, President Sandro Pertini entrusted him with forming a government, which he held uninterruptedly until 1987 thanks to his managerial qualities - longer than most Italian heads of government after the Second World War. During his tenure, Italy became the fifth largest industrial nation and successfully claimed membership in the club of the then G7 .

Regardless of the particular interests of his coalition partners, he forced decisions in the face of a double-digit inflation rate , including the abolition of the inflation- driving scala mobile , the automatic wage adjustment to the inflation rate. However, this also resulted in frequent long-term strikes, especially in the Italian public sector. During his tenure, the Italian public debt rose sharply, which he branded as a major cause of inflation. Craxi dominated Italian politics during the 1980s. He strongly advocated NATO retrofitting and the deployment of US medium-range missiles in Italy. In 1984 the Concordat between the Vatican and the Republic of Italy was signed, with which Catholicism was abolished as the state religion in Italy. The referendum initiated by the PCI to continue scala mobile ended in June 1985 with a victory for Craxi and a defeat for the communists.

Sigonella incident

When Palestinian rioters hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in October 1985 and shot a disabled US passenger in the process, the Italian government negotiated a free withdrawal of the terrorists on the ship that was last in Egyptian waters against the safety of the other passengers and crew members. However, the US government under President Ronald Reagan , who wanted to bring the perpetrators to a US court, succeeded in identifying the Egyptian airliner that flew the four hijackers and two members of the Palestinian Liberation Front who had acted as mediators. including their boss Abu Abbas . Three US Navy fighters then forced the aircraft to land at the NATO air force base in Sigonella in Sicily . Special forces were flown in at the same time. The Italian air traffic control was deceived and the Italian government was not informed. Italian air force soldiers and military police initially prevented the Americans from taking any further measures. Bettino Craxi finally ordered the enforcement of Italian sovereignty, the four kidnappers were arrested after negotiations with the accompanying armed Egyptian security forces. The plane was allowed to travel on to Rome accompanied by an escort . Abu Abbas, who was seen as the man behind the company, was finally allowed to travel to Belgrade and Baghdad anyway, which caused considerable tensions between the USA and Italy.

resignation

Craxi had been Prime Minister since 1983 and led coalition governments in which the DC was always the strongest party. In the summer of 1986 there was therefore an agreement between the DC Secretary General Ciriaco De Mita and Craxi that the office of Prime Minister should be taken over by the DC in March 1987. But then Craxi refused to hand over the office, which is why the DC forced him to resign. In 1989 Craxi won another mandate for the European Parliament.

Mani Pulite

When, in 1992, after the arrest of Mario Chiesa, the public prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro and his team began investigating mani pulite (Eng. Clean hands) and the finances of PSI in Milan, one of the strongholds of PSI, where Craxi's brother-in-law Paolo Pillitteri was temporarily mayor , under the microscope, Craxi got into trouble. Craxi initially called Mario Chiesa a “scoundrel” (“mariuolo”). Prosecutors eventually established that Craxi had set up a system of kickbacks during the construction of the Milan metro . The investigation quickly spread from Milan to other cities.

The entire political class was involved, none of the parties was uninvolved, but corruption was more prevalent in some parties than in others. Craxi ultimately admitted that his party took in the equivalent of around $ 93 million, but argued that ultimately all parties needed money and therefore had used an illegal system of corruption. His strategy was not to plead innocent, but to plead everyone guilty.

In the next elections, the socialists plunged 14 percent into political nothing. While Craxi had previously introduced a five percent clause to move into parliament, the PSI did not even reach the minimum quota, which was reduced to 4 percent. The DC fared similarly, whose political decline took a little longer. The first Italian post-war republic had ceased to exist.

Craxi's lifestyle as party leader, like that of many Italian politicians in the 1990s , was viewed as inappropriate given the financial problems and allegations against his party: Craxi lived in Rome in the expensive Hotel Raphael on Piazza Navona and lived in a villa in Hammamet , Tunisia Meer, about which various, colorful reports went through the media. Rino Formica , a prominent member of the PSI at the time, described it this way: "The monastery is poor, but the monks are rich."

Craxis Entourage was disparagingly referred to by its critics as the “court of dwarfs and dancers”, which also aimed at the loose morality. His system also included the promotion of friends to influential positions with the state industrial conglomerates IRI , ENEL and ENI . It wasn't so important what you could do, but who you knew. It was widely known that RAI positions were assigned according to party affiliation on public radio and television . While the DC at RAI 1 occupied a group of journalists devoted to it with a report devoted to it, PSI managed to accommodate its supporters at RAI 2 and to enforce reporting that was not compliant. Craxi's lover Sandra Milo had a steep career at RAI, while his other lover Anja Pieroni owned a television company in the Rome area. This entourage Craxis also included the future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi , whom Craxi authorized, contrary to the law, to operate more than one private television channel during his tenure as Prime Minister. Craxi's colorful friendships with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and illustrious dictators such as Siad Barre from Somalia and Ben Ali from Tunisia were discussed in public . The latter later granted him political asylum .

Burial site in the Christian cemetery at Hammamet

For a long time, Craxi from the opposition knew how to delay the judiciary's investigations by granting the MP's immunity . In 1993 he finally resigned as General Secretary of PSI. He declared that he had been wrongly persecuted for doing what everyone else had done and refused to apologize for what he did. Despised by broad sections of the public as a symbol of political corruption, students tossed him coins when he left his hotel and sang to the melody of Guantanamera "Bettino take them too" by waving 1,000 lire bills. In May 1994 he fled into exile in Tunisia , while in Italy he was sentenced in absentia to a total of more than 28 years imprisonment, of which he did not serve a single day.

The various convictions amounted to:

• 5 years and 6 months on November 12, 1996,
• 5 years and 5 months on January 22, 1999,
• 4 years and 6 months on April 20, 1999,
• 5 years and 9 months on June 15, 1999,
• 3 years on October 1, 1999 and
• 4 years on October 26, 1999.

Bettino Craxi died in 2000 of complications from his diabetes . Italian politicians hastened to offer the relatives a state funeral, but his daughter still saw her father as a victim of sinister conspiracies.

On the occasion of his summons to the courts, Silvio Berlusconi occasionally compared himself to Bettino Craxi and saw both of them being persecuted by the “red robes” (figuratively for the judiciary allegedly enforced by communists). Many of Craxi's supporters from the PSI, including his former foreign minister Gianni De Michelis , the former political television journalist Giuliano Ferrara and the former priest Gianni Baget Bozzo , joined together in Berlusconi's new right-wing party alliance Casa delle Libertà , which also includes the daughter of Sergio Moroni, Chiara Moroni , a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

Honors

• 1986 honorary doctorates in Philadelphia and Lecce

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Socialist leader Bettino Craxi has become a symbol of corruption and crime in Italy: regardless of losses . In: ZEIT ONLINE . ( zeit.de [accessed on August 25, 2018]).
2. ↑ ^{a b c} The kidnapping of the "Achille Lauro" - a cruise ship, soldiers ready to fight and a lot of diplomacy . In: Deutschlandfunk . ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed on August 25, 2018]).
3. ↑ Bettino the Strong Der Spiegel 11/1987
4. ^ Bettino Craxi's historic victory. In: Der Spiegel 26/1987.

Web links

Commons : Bettino Craxi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry on Bettino Craxi in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs