After three decades, a truth emerges that many suspected and on which the “smoking gun” was still missing. Now we’ve found it. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who led the Italian Episcopal Conference for 16 years (from 1991 to 2007), reveals a disturbing detail: the then President of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaroasked him for help to bring down the Berlusconi government.
The high prelate talks about it in an interview with Corriere della Sera, in which Carlo Verderami asks him about a famous lunch at the Quirinale, immediately after the summer of 1994, in which Scalfaro is said to have invited Ruini, Cardinal Angelo Sodano and Monsignor Louis Tauran (it is discussed in the book “Il Colle d’Italia” ) asking the Vatican for help to unseat the centre-right government led by the Cavaliere. Here is Ruini’s response: “Indeed it went like this. Our decision to oppose what appeared to us to be a maneuver, beyond Scalfaro’s undoubted good faith, was unanimous. And to think that Scalfaro had been a great friend to me”.
Here is the confirmation thirty years later, if there was still any need, that Scalfaro did not act as president of all Italians but as a political actor, plotting to “eliminate”, politically, the leader who had put together a coalition (Forza Italia, Lega, Alleanza Nazionale and Ccd) to prevent the post-communist left from getting its hands in the control room.
History, precisely that year, saw the famous “warranty notice” at the G7 meeting underway in Naples (notice delivered first to Corriere della Sera and then to the interested party), and subsequently Bossi’s League took a step back, effectively causing the executive to fall prematurely, paving the way for the first government of the turnaround, the one led by Lamberto Dini. Short experience, which sparked the centre-left’s revenge in 1996, which took place under the leadership of Romano Prodi. Berlusconi had to wait another five years to return to government, in 2001, after having won elections again.
But let’s go back to Ruini. In the interview with Corriere, the cardinal said he was surprised by Scalfaro’s attitude, especially considering how he had seen him behave a few years earlier. ”I remember when De Mita offered him the position of Prime Minister in 1987, in opposition to Craxi and with the benevolence of the PCI. Scalfaro then came to me and told me that he would refuse. ‘It’s good,’ I replied. And in fact Amintore Fanfani would later go to Palazzo Chigi.
That’s why I was struck by the way he had changed his position, so clearly. I think that Berlusconi has shown his strengths and his limitations, like all other politicians, but that he has in no way had subversive aims. If anything, the dangers for the Republic were different”.
