Ex-Prime Minister Loses Immunity in Mafia Scandal : Italy: In melodramatic fashion, senators allow probe of Andreotti.

Even in a land so wedded to melodrama, a few months ago the scene could only have been staged--as the finale of an opera fraught with intrigue and conspiracy. But it happened Thursday in the baroque chambers of the Italian Senate, and it marked the end of an era.

The vote was whether to authorize magistrates to press their investigation of alleged links with the Mafia by the man who is the symbol of Italy’s postwar development into one of the world’s richest democracies.

The “ si “ hands rose in clear majority. Among them was that of Giulio Andreotti, seven-time prime minister and now target of the most startling judicial probe in the history of the Italian republic.

Andreotti has been named by a number of Mafia turncoats as the political contact point in Rome for the bosses of organized crime. The informers even say he met Mafia bosses secretly in Sicily--and that at one meeting exchanged a fraternal kiss of respect with “boss of bosses” Salvatore Riina.

The 74-year-old Andreotti, a pillar of government for more than four decades and now a senator for life, ridicules the accusations. “Totally false,” he says.

Initially, he argued that the Senate should not lift his parliamentary immunity to allow further investigations by Sicilian magistrates because the charges were based on unsupported accusations by acknowledged gangsters.

He changed his mind, though, in the outcry after the Chamber of Deputies last month short-circuited corruption investigations against another former prime minister, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. Andreotti asked senators to strip his immunity so that he could clear his name, at a trial if necessary.

They obliged Thursday, and he voted with them.

In the tangled web of Italian postwar politics, the most astonishing thing is that the Andreotti affair has occurred at all. Most analysts see it as a telltale presaging collapse of the chummy and corrupt political order that has ruled Italy since World War II.

An unprecedented kickback and payoff scandal over the last 15 months has implicated nearly 3,000 Italian businessmen and political figures. Public outrage against political parties that supped on institutionalized corruption for decades is the dominant reality of national life today. What are now yesterday’s political parties--Andreotti’s Christian Democrats, Craxi’s Socialists and the renamed and social-democratized Communists--are battling for survival.

The infection also spread to the 2-week-old government of Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi when Environment Minister Valdo Spini, who held the same post in the previous government, was warned Thursday that he is being investigated. Television reports said his involvement in suspected offenses relating to foreign aid to Albania is at issue.

The Mafia, for its part, is faring scarcely better than the besieged political parties. More than 300 informers, including some of the same ones who now accuse Andreotti, have led police to a breathtaking series of major arrests.

In recent months, Italy has become as accustomed to major new Mafia arrests as to those of prominent business leaders on corruption charges. Riina, the Mafia boss in Sicily for more than a decade, was arrested in January after 23 years as a fugitive and is now in jail in Palermo.