The Parliament elected in 1987 was the first since the 1960s to complete its full five-year span, but at the dissolution its record suggested stalemate as much as stability. Some limited steps had been taken towards the changes in institutional arrangements and public policy that have for some years been widely agreed to be necessary, but they were modest in relation to the scale of the problems of political disaggregation, executive weakness, and budgetary overload Italy now faces. Tensions inside the five-party (pentapartito) government-especially between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists-produced four governments under three different DC prime ministers, Goria, De Mita, and Andreotti. The fimal year of the legislature was a particularly sterile one: in effect an extended election campaign with the coalition hoping to benefit from the decline of the opposition Communist Party-a process already well-advanced during the 1980s and apparently set to accelerate following the collapse of international communism. As the results set out in the Table on p.380 demonstrate, such hope was illconceived. The electoral decline of the Communist opposition, following its transformation into the Democratic Left Party (PDS), was substantial, (26.6 to 16.1 per cent) but the greatest part of this went to the breakaway Communist Refoundation (RC). Indeed, instead of boosting the fortunes of the coalition, the end of the cold war seemed to liberate voters of the political centre to protest against the policy failures of the government. The narrowing ideological spectrum helped focus political debate on a range of issues-the adequacy of basic services, the failure of the state to guarantee the fundamentals of law and order, the transparency and probity of public life-which undermined confidence not just in particular leaders or parties but in the entire political class.