Francesco Cossiga, who has died aged 82 of cardiovascular illness, was the president of Italy from 1985 to 1992. For the first five years of his presidency he behaved like his predecessors, pretending to be a father of the nation, assuming the required gravitas, or occasionally relinquishing it during one of the frequent government crises, when a past of wheeling and dealing turned out to be useful.
Then, in 1990, Cossiga began to speak his mind: "What a relief," he confided later, "It was like removing pebbles from one's shoes." He became sarcastic, ironic, polemical, lunging against the right, then against the left, making fun of his former colleagues. He became known as "il picconatore" or the pickaxe-wielder. Some began to doubt his sanity.
Cossiga had a serious purpose. He was convinced, and subsequent events substantiated his view, that the sclerotic Italian political system, so long sustained by the cold war, would have to change drastically after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Had Cossiga confided such forebodings to the inner circles of politics, no one would have taken any notice. He decided to go public, but, in so doing, he had to abandon the careful, coded and occasionally incomprehensible language of Italian politics and wield his pickaxe. He obviously relished the role, telling the press: "I have given you plenty to write about!"
He justified himself (while still president) by declaring: "In a normal country, if a president of the republic did what I do, they would put him away at once. But is this a normal country? No! It barely moves. And I, as president, do what I can to signal the scandalous nature of its abnormality." And he continued: "In a country where the government governs and the opposition opposes, in a country with little organised crime, where judges judge, villains are arrested by the police, citizens pay their taxes … well, in this kind of country I would be put away. But here it's different. It's the country that is insane."
Cossiga was a native of Sardinia, a poor and sparsely inhabited island, once known mainly for its sheep and cheese, which has produced more than its share of leading politicians: Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist; Antonio Segni, twice prime minister and president of the republic; and Enrico Berlinguer, the former leader of the Italian communist party. As is often the case, local politics is in the hands of a few families (Berlinguer was Cossiga's cousin and both were related to Segni) and those who are bright and determined can move quickly to the capital to represent those left behind.
Cossiga joined the DC (Christian Democracy) party aged 16, graduated in law from Sassari University at 20 and was an MP at 30. In 1966, he became a junior defence minister in a government led by Aldo Moro and in 1976 became its youngest-yet home secretary. This was a fateful appointment, as he was in charge in 1978 when Moro, his friend and protector and an architect of the "historic compromise" with the communists, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades and killed 55 days later. Moro begged Cossiga to save his life by negotiating with the terrorists, but Cossiga, backed by the prime minister Giulio Andreotti, refused all compromise. In retrospect, most acknowledge that this was the right course, but at the time it was controversial.
The Moro affair over, Cossiga resigned, announcing he was "politically dead". The resurrection followed almost immediately, when he became briefly prime minister (1979-80). In July 1983, he was elected president of the senate and, finally, in 1985, at the age of 57, president of the republic, the youngest so far. He had been, hitherto, a fairly uninteresting politician, more or less permanently in government. His main claim to fame was to have been so detested by radicals that his name was sprayed on city walls as "Kossiga" (and with the "ss" as in the Nazi SS).
As a result of Cossiga's outspokenness as president, other tongues loosened. Andreotti, never a friend and never one to be upstaged, revealed the existence of a secret network, Gladio, set up under the auspices of Nato to organise an armed anti-communist resistance should the country "fall" to the Reds. Cossiga, it turned out, had played a significant part in Gladio. This reinforced conspiracy theories suggesting that the secret services and the CIA had had a hand in the terrorism of the 1970s and that Gladio was somehow part of this.
Indeed, some sources (including a former head of Italian counter-intelligence) claimed that the US secret services even had knowledge of the bomb placed in Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969, for which the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli (the hero of Dario Fo's play Accidental Death of an Anarchist) had been arrested and allegedly "suicided". Cossiga, while distancing himself from the more serious charges, accepted that he had been involved in Gladio. A subsequent communist attempt to impeach him failed.
As a former president, he became senator for life. And he continued to enjoy his transmutation from colourless to colourful. He revealed that, when he was prime minister in 1980, it had been the French (and not the Americans or home terrorists) who, in hot pursuit of a Libyan MiG jet fighter, had mistakenly shot down in mid-air an Italian domestic plane, killing all its passengers.
In November 2007, the Corriere della Sera reported that Cossiga had declared that everyone knew that 9/11 had been engineered by the CIA and Mossad with the "help of the Zionist world" to discredit the Arabs. He was, of course, being ironic – though this did not stop the statement circulating all over the internet. Asked in 2008 if he supported Silvio Berlusconi's tough line on student protest, he replied that the Italian state, being weak, should do what he did in the 1960s: infiltrate the movement, encourage them to burn shops and cars, and then, with popular support, use brute force, and send the radicals to hospital, along with their professors. It had become difficult to take him seriously. Yet he had written a book about Sir Thomas More, so perhaps he did take himself seriously.
In 1960, he had married Giuseppa Sigurani, from whom he was divorced in 1998. They had two children, Anna Maria, now a writer, and Giuseppe, currently junior minister for defence in Berlusconi's government (his father's first job).