Gianni Agnelli defined him, with Savoy irony, “the typical intellectual of Magna Graecia”, and despite Ciriaco De Mita having held all possible political and institutional positions, except the Presidency of the Republic, Agnelli’s definition catches the sign. The former premier and former secretary of the DC was the politician of the First Republic who more than others tried to combine political action with academic reflection, in search of social and political innovations, all mixed with his edgy character. Last but not least, he, as DC secretary, brought in two “professors”, Romano Prodi and the current tenant of the Quirinale Sergio Mattarella.
Born in Nusco, in the province of Avellino on February 2, 1928, after high school De Mita won a scholarship to follow the courses of the Cattolica in Milan, forge of a host of exponents of Giuseppe Lazzati’s “godchildren” democratic Catholicism, who knew to combine social and political commitment with that within the Church that was moving towards the renewal of the Second Vatican Council. Enrolled at a very young age in the DC, in 1953 he was among the adherents of the “Base” current of Giovanni Marcora, the partisan Albertino, who wanted to avoid a conservative drift of the Catholic party. The intellectual brilliance of his congressional interventions led him to climb the scudocrociate hierarchy, until his first election in 1963 to the Chamber, where he sat continuously until 1994. In 1969 he promoted the so-called Pact of San Ginesio among the forty-year-olds to subtract the control of the party to the dorotei, and in 1973 he became deputy secretary of the DC. In those years he was in government several times (Minister of Industry, Foreign Trade, of the South, until in 1979 he returned to his commitment to the party as deputy secretary and in 1982 finally secretary, a position he held until February 1989.
In that role De Mita tried to renew the DC: overcoming the exasperating splitting of currencies could be pursued with a renewed connection with civil society. And here is his call from Professor Prodi to IRI and then as minister, or that of the jurist Sergio Mattarella, Piersanti’s brother, to clean up the DC in Palermo. De Mita was convinced of the need to overcome the PCI’s “conventio ad excludendum”, along the lines of Aldo Moro, and this led him to clash with the PSI secretary Bettino Craxi, who instead launched the “competition” on the left with the communists . This did not prevent De Mita from becoming Prime Minister in April 1988, while he was still secretary of his party, the only one to hold the double post after Fanfani. But already in February 1989 the current of Gava, Forlani and Andreotti defeated De Mita at the DC congress and, after having given up the office of secretary, in the following July had to give up that of Prime Minister in favor of Andreotti, a government that started the so-called CAF (Craxi-Andreotti-Fornali) which managed the final phase of the First Republic.
De Mita was engaged in institutional reforms, and as soon as he was appointed to Palazzo Chigi in 1988, the BR killed his advisor Roberto Ruffilli, a theorist of the uninominal. De Mita led the Bicameral for constitutional reforms in 1992, whose leadership then passed to NIlde Iotti, but after the approval of the electoral law Mattarella in 1993, President Scalfaro dissolved the Chambers in the wake of Tangentopoli. The appearance of Silvio Berlusconi helped to wipe out the old parties, and De Mita, after two sabbatical years, was back in Parliament in 1996, first with the PPI, then with the Margherita, until 2008, when the secretary of the new party, the Democratic Party, Walter Veltroni, did not want to reapply him, which broke the link with De Mita’s center-left. However, the passion for politics pushed him in the last years of his life to run as a candidate and to be elected mayor of his Nusco, a return to his Magna Graecia.
Source: Ansa
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