Oscar Luigi Scalfaro
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro was elected president two days after a motorway bomb, and spent seven years holding the state together while the parties that had built it were dissolved by their own courts. He was a magistrate before he was a politician, a Christian Democrat of the austere Catholic right, and he had been in parliament since the constituent assembly of 1946. The electoral college of 1992 had been deadlocked for two weeks when the mafia blew up half a kilometre of motorway outside Palermo to kill the magistrate who had built the case that convicted its leadership; the college elected Scalfaro the day after the funeral, in a chamber that had run out of the composure to bargain. The magistrate's closest colleague was killed by a second bomb eight weeks later. His presidency coincided exactly with the collapse of the party system. Investigations begun in Milan in February 1992 established that the financing of Italian politics had been systematically criminal for decades; within two years the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, who had governed continuously since the war, had both dissolved. Scalfaro's response was to use the powers of appointment aggressively, installing governments of technicians when no parliamentary majority could be assembled, and to treat the presidency as the one institution that had to remain standing. That made him the most contested president since the war. When the right's coalition broke apart at the end of 1994 he refused its leader's demand for immediate elections and appointed another technical government instead, which was within his powers and was denounced for the next twenty years as a coup against a mandate. The government he appointed carried out the pension reform and the fiscal squeeze that qualified Italy for the single currency, which it joined at the launch in 1999, four months before he left office.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
