The Election of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to the Presidency of the Republic

Abstract

At 13.04 on Thursday, 13 May 1999, on the first ballot, a joint session of parliament elected the seventy-nine-year-old Treasury Minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, to the office of the ninth President of the Italian Republic (tenth if the ‘provisional’ President Enrico De Nicola, in office from 1946 to approval of the Constitution, is included in the list). This was only the second time in the history of the Italian presidential elections1 that a candidate had been elected on the first ballot. On the single previous occasion (1985) – following adroit negotiations by the secretary of the Democrazia cristiana (Christian Democrats: DC), Ciriaco De Mita – the choice had fallen on the then President of the Senate, Francesco Cossiga, ex-Prime Minister, and Minister of the Interior at the time of the Aldo Moro kidnapping. The 707 votes gained by Ciampi (representing 71.4 percent of those entitled to vote) suggest a substantial majority, (albeit one not much over the quorum of 674 votes) in favour of the centre- left candidate. Yet the 183 votes lacking from the theoretical majority which should have sustained Ciampi from the first round of voting suggest that there were those who would have preferred matters to be much less clear-cut.