L'IDEA DI UN'ALTRA ITALIA - REPUBBLICANI E LIBERALI NEGLI ANNI OTTANTA

The research aims to analyse the events of the Liberal Party and the Republican Party in the period between Giovanni Spadolini's appointment as Prime Minister and the collapse of the party system, in a phase very little explored by historiography, already generally lacking in studies on liberals and republicans. The starting point, and at the same time the basic historiographical problem around which the work revolves, is located in the identification and definition as an autonomous object of investigation of a non-socialist secular area, a sort of imaginary fourth pole, which includes and unites within it the liberal and republican traditions. Unlike what happens on the other side of the field of secular parties, the socialist one, where the whole path of Psi and Psdi is marked by a fluctuating relationship but fed by the awareness of a common matrix, between the republicans and liberals an authentic convergence has never been possible. An incompatibility of a historical, ideological and political nature always remained between the Pli and Pri, which was very difficult to erase. In the 1980s, however, an interaction between the transformations of society and customs and the partial overturning of consolidated political and governmental schemes intervened powerfully to change the scenario, and decisively altered the terms of political confrontation, which were increasingly far from the schemes of the recent past. The research intends to emphasise precisely the new elements that intervene in the period under consideration, studying how they intersect with the choices and nature of the political forces examined (Pri and Pli), from a perspective that devotes ample space to the cultural component of political paths. The work is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to the events of Pri and Pli in the early part of the decade, when the advent of the Pentapartite majorities and Giovanni Spadolini's Presidency of the Council marked the beginning of a new political phase. The second part deals with foreign policy, a terrain that in the phase under consideration becomes of crucial importance in order to grasp the affinities and differences between Pli and Pri, and an analysis of the approach taken by the two parties to issues more directly related to the field of civil rights and the new emergencies of the decade, such as environmentalism, the relationship between citizens and justice, the relationship with religion and the role of women in society. The third part, finally, deals with the last tormented season in the life of the two parties, confronting two issues that cross the entire 1980s to become central in the public debate of the early 1990s: the moral question, which sees the peak of its relevance with the Tangentopoli affair, and the issue of institutional reforms, which marks the debate in the phase immediately preceding the collapse of the party system.