De Mita, funeral tomorrow in Nusco with Mattarella. The rite in the church of Sant'Amato at 18.30:XNUMX.
The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella will also participate in the funeral ceremony.
The funeral will take place at the end of the state visit of the Algerian president who will be in Naples tomorrow together with the Italian head of state.
Gianni Agnelli defined him, with Savoyard irony, as “the typical intellectual of Magna Graecia”, and despite the fact that Ciriaco De Mita held every possible political and institutional position, except the Presidency of the Republic, Agnelli’s definition hits the mark.
The former prime minister 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 prickly character.
Last but not least, he is the one who, as DC secretary, brought two "professors" into the field, Romano Prodi and the current occupant of the Quirinal Sergio Mattarella.
Born in Nusco, in the province of Avellino on February 2, 1928, after high school De Mita won a scholarship to attend courses at the Catholic University of Milan, a hotbed of a group of exponents of democratic Catholicism, "godchildren" of Giuseppe Lazzati, who were able to combine social and political commitment with that within the Church which was moving towards the renewal of the Second Vatican Council.
Having joined the DC at a very young age, in 1953 he was among the supporters of the “Base” movement of Giovanni Marcora, the partisan Albertino, who wanted to avoid a conservative drift of the Catholic party.
His intellectual brilliance, that of his speeches at congresses, led him to climb the ranks of the Scudetto hierarchy, until his first election in 1963 to the Chamber, where he sat uninterruptedly until 1994.
In 1969 he promoted the so-called Pact of San Ginesio among the forty-year-olds to take control of the party away from the Dorotei, and in 1973 he became vice-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 the party as vice-secretary and finally in 1982 as secretary, a position he held until February 1989.
In that role De Mita tried to renew the DC: the overcoming of the exasperating factional fragmentation could be pursued with a renewed connection with civil society. And here is his call of Professor Prodi to Iri and then as minister, or that of the jurist Sergio Mattarella, brother of Piersanti, to clean up the Palermo DC.
De Mita was convinced of the need to overcome the “conventio ad excludendum” of the PCI, along the lines of Aldo Moro, and this led him to clash with the secretary of the PSI Bettino Craxi, who instead had 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 role after Fanfani.
But already in February 1989 the faction of Gava, Forlani and Andreotti defeated De Mita at the DC congress and, after having given up the position 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) that managed the final phase of the First Republic. De Mita was involved in institutional reforms, and as soon as he was appointed to Palazzo Chigi in 1988 the Red Brigades killed his advisor Roberto Ruffilli, the theoretician of single-member constituencies.
In 1992, De Mita led the Bicameral Commission for Constitutional Reforms, whose leadership was then passed to Nilde Iotti, but after the approval of the Mattarella electoral law in 1993, President Scalfaro dissolved the Chambers in the wake of Tangentopoli.
Silvio Berlusconi's entry into the political arena contributed to sweeping away the old parties, and after two sabbatical years De Mita was back in Parliament in 1996, first with the PPI, then with the Margherita, until 2008, when the secretary of the new party, the PD, Walter Veltroni, did not want to re-nominate him, which broke the ties with De Mita's centre-left.
However, in the last years of his life, his passion for politics pushed him to run for and be elected mayor of his Nusco, a return to his Magna Graecia.
Article published on May 26, 2022 - 12:03 pm
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