in the italian senate: a personal memoir
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Abstract Here I recount my experience as a three-term Senator of the Italian Republic between 1983 and 1996. It is a personal memoir written with a modest dose of self-praise and nostalgia. I have tried to explain how the Italian parliament works, to analyse the relationships between parliamentarians and parties, with special emphasis on the Italian Communist Party, whose voters sent me to the Senate, and to indicate what I have contributed and what I have learned. For better or worse, throughout that long period, I remained a professor of political science. Hence, I have also made reference to those of my writings that have been directly influenced by my experience of ‘real’ politics, as well as to my efforts to influence ‘real’ politics. Much has changed in Italian politics and my experience, which could not be repeated today, suggests that not much has changed positively.
Keywords
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Italy; Senate; member of Parliament; politics; parties
was first elected to the Italian Senate in June 1983; re-elected in 1987; defeated in 1992, and re-elected in March 1994. The end of my parliamentary career came in February 1996 with the dissolution of the shortest-lived Italian parliament ever. This memoir will try to convey how, in those long years, my professional knowledge as a political scientist helped me in my activity as a parliamentarian – and what, on the other hand, my experience as a parliamentarian taught me about political science. A note of caution is, however, absolutely necessary. From many points of view, my experience was unique and cannot offer material for
easy generalisations, not because I am endowed with some exceptional personal qualities, but because of the political and parliamentary circumstances. All this should appear very clearly in the following narrative, which I develop according to some classical political-science canons.
RECRUITMENT When I was asked to be a candidate for the 1983 parliamentary elections, not only had I never held any previous elective political office – I was not even a member of any party. While I could and did not wish to hide my left-wing political european political science: 4 2005
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preferences, my political activities were, in a sense, a continuation of my lecturing activities: that is, I have always tried to teach political knowledge and to explain how ‘good politics’ can come about. I had often given speeches in party and associational headquarters, although certainly not all of them were leftist. I also regularly contributed a column to a weekly and to a couple of newspapers (only later on, after my election, to the official Communist newspaper, l’Unita `). As I learned later, my potential candidacy was in all likelihood first suggested as a result of the paradoxical convergence of the leader of the Communist left, Pietro Ingrao, and the leader of the ‘reformists’ within the PCI, the so-called miglioristi, Giorgio Napolitano. Apparently, both had r
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