Rome, 16 August (Adnkronos) – “It was an honour for me to sit in Parliament next to Palmiro Togliatti and also Giorgio Almirante”. Words that can sound like an invitation to overcome those ideological barriers and those repeated temptations to remain prisoners of the past that pollute political debate on a daily basis, without taking anything away from the unequivocal judgments handed down by and to history. These words were spoken on 27 May 2008 by Francesco Cossiga, whose death anniversary will be fourteen years tomorrow, speaking in the Senate Chamber on the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his first election to Parliament.
“It was an honor for me – the President Emeritus of the Republic stated – to sit in Parliament next to Palmiro Togliatti, the great political leader of the ‘new party’, who studied, among other things, at my same high school, lived for a long time in my city and – by chance – was a guest in the house of my great-grandmother, who – as he himself told me – was so good that, since they were poor, she invited them to her house every day”.
“Palmiro Togliatti who, together with Alcide De Gasperi, preserved Italy – Cossiga recalled – from a devastating civil war, after our country had fought against the invading Germans that great patriotic war that was the Resistance, also stopping that civil and class war that, in the name of an unrealistic vision of Italy’s position, caused so many victims, not only former members of the Italian Social Republic, but also anti-fascists, partisans, soldiers of the Kingdom of the South, priests, seminarians, boys of the Catholic movement, who were killed in the name of a utopia that then, in the name of a betrayed and incomplete Resistance, generated, in the Seventies and Eighties, the armed struggle”.
“It was also an honor for me to sit next to Giorgio Almirante, to whom Italy owes a lot – explained the then senator for life – because, through the parliamentarization of the young people of Salò, as my friend Violante rightly called them, he started the process of inclusion in democracy of those who had been fascists or militants in the Republic of Salò”.
“This process – Cossiga continued – was started on the left thanks to the broad (and far-reaching) amnesty granted by Palmiro Togliatti, Minister of Justice at the time, who was harshly contested by his own party for crimes committed during the Resistance by partisans, but also by members of the Armed Forces of the Italian Social Republic. This then led to the mass adhesion of former soldiers of the Italian Social Republic to the Italian Communist Party in numbers that exceeded, as communist historians wrote, 36,000 members”.
