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.

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.

[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.

[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.

Christian Democracy suffered a significant swing against it, but the coalition it had led prior to the elections managed to retain a small majority.

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.

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.