Andreotti Asks Italian Senate to Lift His Immunity

Asserting his innocence, seven-time former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on Monday asked the Italian Senate to lift his parliamentary immunity to aid judicial probes of allegations that he was a longtime point man in Rome for the Mafia.

The unexpected maneuver by the 74-year-old Andreotti immediately diminished tension within Italy’s overheated political arena.

Analysts said it improved the longevity prospects of the transition government of Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. His technocrats’ Cabinet, formed last week, faces an inaugural vote of confidence in Parliament on Thursday, the same day the Senate was scheduled to vote in the Andreotti case.

“Convinced that the accusations against me are totally without foundation, I wish only that the magistrates firmly establish truth and responsibility,” Andreotti said in a statement. “I ask only that they act quickly. This episode has caused high feelings, even on an international scale, and not only against me personally.”

At least three major Mafia turncoats have identified Andreotti, the canny and durable symbol of Christian Democrat postwar Italian politics, as the point of reference in Rome for Sicilian organized crime.

The informers also allege that Andreotti traveled to Sicily at least twice to meet with Mafia leaders, including boss of bosses Salvatore Riina, now on trial for murder and other gang crimes in Palermo.

Andreotti, senator-for-life since leaving the premiership last year, denies the charges and presented a detailed defense to the Senate last month. In a preliminary vote last week, a 23-member Senate committee recommended his immunity be lifted, thereby allowing magistrates to proceed with investigations.

The scheduled full-Senate vote this week loomed as a potential flash point of political conflict in the wake of the Chamber of Deputies’ refusal to allow magistrates to fully investigate Bettino Craxi, another former prime minister and longtime leader of the Socialist Party, who has been named in political bribery and payoff scandals.

The Socialists have been one of the principal targets of an unprecedented nationwide investigation into bribery and kickbacks that has implicated nearly 3,000 politicians and business leaders and has triggered electoral rebellion and a clamorous demand for reform.

Pandemonium broke out in Parliament last week, and protesters surged into the streets of Rome, Milan and other major cities when the Chamber of Deputies authorized magistrates to proceed against Craxi in only two of six major investigations.

In the tumult, four of Ciampi’s ministers, including three former Communists, resigned within hours of taking office as part of a government whose first priority is to promote electoral reform and to call national elections in the fall.

Since then, political passions appear to have eased, although reformers are now demanding that parliamentary immunity be abolished as part of a widely supported overhaul of the political system.

With calls for Ciampi’s departure and for immediate elections now restricted to minority parties of the extreme right and left, Andreotti’s action Monday reinforces a growing feeling among major parties that change cannot effectively come at a gallop.

A Ciampi government, however weak, is a necessary alternative to snap elections, it is argued.