Francesco Cossiga
Francesco Cossiga spent five years as a silent president and then two attacking the republic he presided over, until he resigned early and it collapsed without him. He was a Sardinian constitutional lawyer, a Christian Democrat, and interior minister in 1978 when the Red Brigades kidnapped the leader of his party. He ran the security response, held the line against negotiating, and resigned the day the body was found in a car boot in central Rome; he was forty-nine and it marked him permanently. He was prime minister at the end of the decade and was elected president in 1985 on the first ballot, an almost unheard-of consensus. For five years he was scrupulously quiet. Then, from 1990, he began what the Italian press named the pickaxe blows: a sustained public assault, delivered in interviews and off-the-cuff remarks, on the parties, the magistrates, the constitution and the postwar settlement, in which he described the political system as a corpse that had not been buried. Much of it was calculated and some of it was not; his opponents said he was unwell and his defenders said he was the only person in Rome telling the truth. In the middle of it he disclosed the existence of a clandestine NATO stay-behind network in Italy, which he had helped to run as a young official, and set off a decade of parliamentary inquiry. He resigned in April 1992, three months early, on the grounds that the system was finished and he would not preside over its funeral. Within a year the corruption investigations had destroyed the two parties that had governed Italy since 1945 and the entire party system was gone, which is the strongest available argument that the pickaxe blows had been a diagnosis rather than a breakdown.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2010 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
