In accordance with the Italian Constitution, the election was held in the form of a secret ballot, with the Senators and the Deputies entitled to vote. The election was held in the Palazzo Montecitorio, home of the Chamber of Deputies, with the capacity of the building expanded for the purpose. The first three ballots required a two-thirds majority of the 1,014 voters in order to elect a president, or 676 votes. Starting from the fourth ballot, an absolute majority was required for candidates to be elected, or 508 votes. The presidential mandate lasts seven years.
On 28 April 1992 President Francesco Cossiga resigned two months before the end of his term. The reason of his resignation was related to a growing tension between Cossiga and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. This tension emerged in October 1990 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 acknowledged his involvement in the establishment of the organization.[1][2] Subsequently in 1991 the Democratic Party of the Left asked to start a procedure of impeachment against him (Presidents of Italy can be impeached only for high treason against the State or for an attempt to overthrow the Constitution).[3][4] Although he threatened to prevent the impeachment procedure by dissolving Parliament, the impeachment request was ultimately dismissed.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Italian politics was undergoing a period of instability and growing tensions. In February 1991, the Northern League, which was first launched as an upgrade of the Northern Alliance in December 1989, was officially transformed into a party through the merger of various regional parties, notably including Lombard League and Venetian League, under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. These continue to exist as "national sections" of the federal party, which presents itself in regional and local contests as "Northern League–Lombard League", "Northern League–Venetian League", "Northern League Piedmont", and so on.[5][6][7] The League exploited resentment against the centralised, Rome-based Italian government (with the famous slogan Roma ladrona, "Rome (is a) robber"), common in the North as many there felt that the government wasted resources collected mostly from northerners' taxes.[8] Cultural influences from bordering countries in the North and resentment against illegal immigrants were also exploited. The party's electoral successes began roughly at a time when public disillusionment with the established political parties was at its height. The Tangentopoli corruption scandals, which invested most of the established parties, were unveiled from 1992 on.[6][7] However, contrarily to what many pundits observed at the beginning of the 1990s, LN became a stable political force and it is by far the oldest party among those represented in the Italian Parliament. The Northern League's first electoral breakthrough was at the 1990 regional elections, but it was with the 1992 general election that the party emerged as a leading political actor. Having gained 8.7% of the vote, 56 deputies and 26 senators,[9] it became the fourth largest party of the country and within Parliament.
In 1991 the Italian Communist Party split into the Democratic Party of the Left, led by Achille Occhetto, and the Communist Refoundation Party, headed by Armando Cossutta. Occhetto, leader of the communists since 1988, stunned the party faithfully assembled in a working-class section of Bologna with a speech heralding the end of communism, a move now referred to in Italian politics as the svolta della Bolognina (Bolognina turning point). The collapse of the communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had convinced Occhetto that the era of Eurocommunism was over, and he transformed the Communist Party into a progressive left-wing party, the Democratic Party of the Left.
A third of the Communist Party's former members, led by Cossutta, refused to join the PDS, and instead founded the Communist Refoundation Party.[10]
On 17 February 1992, judge Antonio Di Pietro had Mario Chiesa, a member of the Italian Socialist Party, arrested for accepting a bribe from a Milan cleaning firm. The Italian Socialist Party distanced themselves from Chiesa. Bettino Craxi called Mario Chiesa mariuolo, or "villain", a "wild splinter" of the otherwise clean PSI. Upset over this treatment by his former colleagues, Chiesa began to give information about corruption implicating his colleagues. This marked the beginning of the Mani pulite investigation; news of political corruption began spreading in the press.
The 1992 general election, held on 5 April that year, marked a huge earthquake for the Italian politics. Christian Democracy suffered a significant swing against it, but the coalition it had led prior to the elections managed to retain a small majority. Opposition parties won a significant amount of support. The resulting parliament was therefore weak and difficult to bring to an agreement. The so called "CAF" alliance (the Craxi-Andreotti-Forlani axis), a pact to revive the Pentapartito coalition—the scheme was conceived in 1991 to allow Giulio Andreotti to become the next President of the Italian Republic and Bettino Craxi to become the next Prime Minister—had been heavily crushed by the popular vote.
In this context, the Italian Parliament convened to elect the new President on 13 May 1992. As the count progressed no candidate was able to emerge, not even Giulio Andreotti whose candidacy was soon made to sink, and the voting process ended up in a real political deadlock. While the count was still ongoing, on 23 May 1992 the popular anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police escort agents were killed by a bomb put on the Highway A29 by the Sicilian mafia near Capaci. The huge wave of public indignation and anger for this crime forced the Parliament to quickly elect a new President and solve the political deadlock. On 25 May 1992, the President of the Chamber of Deputies Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, seen as a man above the parts and as a true defender of the republican institutions, was finally elected President and officially sworn in on 28 May 1992.
