Francesco Cossiga (born July 26, 1928) is an Italian politician and former President of the Italian Republic. He was also a professor of law at University of Sassari.

Early career

Cossiga (commonly called [kos'siga]; but the original pronunciation is ['kɔssiga], with the stress on the first syllable) was born at Sassari, Sardinia. He started his political career during World War II in groups of Catholic reference.

He has been several times a minister for Democrazia Cristiana (DC); notably during his stay at Viminale (Ministry for internal affairs) he re-structured Italian police, civil protection and secret services organisations. He was in charge during the kidnapping and murdering of Aldo Moro by Red Brigades and resigned when Moro was found dead in 1978.

Election as President of Italy

Resigning from his post, he earned the respect of the opposition (in particular of the Italian Communist Party) because he appeared as the only member of the government who took responsibility for the tragic conclusion of the events. This led to his election in 1985 as President of the Republic (Head of State), in which for the first time ever a candidate won at the first ballot (where a majority of over ⅔ is necessary, which would subsequently decrease in later ballots). The only other president of the Italian Republic elected at the first ballot was Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in 1999.

The Cossiga Presidency

Cossiga's presidency was unremarkable for its first five years, as most presidents until then refrained entering the open political debate in order to remain figures of reference for the whole nation.

However, in his last two years as a President, Cossiga began to express opinions, at times virulent, against the Italian political system. In his opinion, Italian parties, and especially DC and PCI, had to take into account the deep change that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War would have brought.

These declarations, soon dubbed "esternazioni", or "mattock blows" (picconate), were considered by many inappropriate for a President. Some even suggested he was somewhat mentally unstable. Cossiga declared he was just "taking pleasure in removing some sand from my shoes". Cossiga was supported by the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi.

A strong tension with the President of the Council of Ministers Giulio Andreotti emerged when Andreotti revealed the existence of Gladio, a Stay-behind organization with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Cossiga declared his involvement in the setup of the organization. The Communist party started a procedure for impeachment (Presidents of Italy can be impeached only for high treason against the State or Attempt against the Constitution). The request of impeachment was subsequently withdrawn.

Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term, on April 28 1992. He was voted again for president by the fascist Italian Social Movement, that had supported him in his campaigns.

Lifetime senator

After his resignation from Quirinale (the Roman hill in which is the office of the Head of State), he is a lifetime senator, like all the former Presidents of the Republic, since 1992. His current title is President Emeritus of the Italian Republic.

In February 1998 Cossiga created the UDR party (Unione Democratica per la Repubblica), declarately a centrist political formation. The UDR was a crucial component of the majority that supported the D'Alema government in October 1998, after the fall of the Prodi government which lost a confidence vote.

Cossiga declared that his support for D'Alema was meant to end the conventional exclusion of the former Communist Party PCI leaders from the premiership in Italy.

In 1999 UDR was dissolved. Cossiga returned to his senator for life activity, with a prominent interest in security matters, as his parliamentary record shows (see http://www.senato.it/leg/14/BGT/Schede/Attsen/00000698.htm).

He remains a vocal commentator of Italian politics, and has acquired a reputation for rapidly shifting positions, possibly because as a lifetime senator he does not need to be loyal to any party to be re-elected. He does no longer play a major political role. He is a collaborator of several newspapers.

South Tyrol independence controversy

In May 2006, former Italian president Francesco Cossiga brought in a bill that would allow the autonomous region of South Tyrol to hold a referendum, where voters could decide whether to stay with Italy, return to Austria, or become fully independent ^[1]. While the proposed bill was immediately rejected in the Italian parliament, the political repercussions in the region and Austria were quite large. The South Tyrolean People's party (SVP) rejected the proposal, saying this would just create ethnic tensions again. Cossiga made similar remarks again in 2007, calling for a solution by letting South Tyrol rejoin Austria.

Miscellaneous news

Italian magazine Panorama revealed that he had sent a letter to prime minister Giulio Andreotti after having reviewed the content of interviews between RAI journalist Ennio Remondino and former CIA agents Richard Brenneke and Ibrahim Razin, concerning links between the CIA and P2 freemasonry lodge, as well as the circumstances of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme's murder in 1986. President Cossiga was concerned by the statements, and said: "If the government were to think that the information had any basis, I think that it should inform the judiciary authority and the Parliamentary Commission on Massacres and, at the level of the bilateral relations, the relevant authorities in the U.S.A. and in Sweden." Otherwise, the journalists who published the information without previously thoroughly checking its validity, should be punished [1].