Introduction

It is conventional among writers on Italian politics to divide its history from the birth of the Italian state in 1861 into three main types of regime – the liberal, the Fascist and the republican. The republican era is often divided into two, the first running from the promulgation of the republican constitution after 1948 up to the early 1990s, and the second from the early 1990s to the present. In each of these, those in government tended to see the forces of political opposition as inherently illegitimate. In each case they saw their mission as being less to ‘govern’ than to defend the state against the forces of opposition, which they saw as ‘usurpers’. The ultimate failure of those in power to contain the forces of opposition led to a crisis of the regime itself (Salvadori, 1994). The latest of these was prompted by a number of factors including, most notably, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the signing of the European Union's Maastricht Treaty in 1991, and revelations of widespread political corruption that emerged after the Italian general election of 1992. The result of this combination of political circumstances was that the parties that had been in power in the first republican period began to disintegrate, to be replaced by new and different parties and political forces. However, a regime transition of modern Italy is yet far from complete because there is still no fundamental constitutional change.