The election was called by President Sandro Pertini one year before the previous legislature's natural end on 5 May 1983, after a crisis in the incumbent government majority (Pentapartito).

[citation needed] Even if the PSI never became a serious electoral challenger either to the PCI or the DC, its pivotal position in the political arena allowed it to claim the post of Prime Minister for Craxi after the 1983 general election.

The Christian Democrats accepted this compromise to avoid a new election and Craxi became the first Socialist in the history of the Italian Republic to be appointed Prime Minister.

[7] Starting from 1983, Craxi led the third longest-lived government of Italy during the republican era,[8] being a close ally of two key figures of DC, Giulio Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, in a loose cross-party alliance often dubbed CAF.

Against trade union resistance, Craxi reacted by abolishing wage-price indexation (a mechanism known as scala mobile or "escalator"), under which wages had been increased automatically in line with inflation.

[12] Abolishing the escalator system did help reduce inflation, which was also falling in other major countries, but in the long term it inevitably increased industrial action as workers had to bargain for better salaries.