[3] Following the general election, Christian democrat Giovanni Goria, a protégé of DC party leader Ciriaco De Mita, became prime minister at the head of a renewed Pentapartito coalition.

Despite the initial credit towards Goria's reformist agenda, he was soon forced to resign in April 1988 after the Parliament refused to pass the government budget.

[4] However, in Spring 1989 the so-called "pact of the camper" stipulated between the socialist leader Bettino Craxi and the Christian democratic leaders Arnaldo Forlani and Giulio Andreotti – secretly shared in a parking out of Ex Ansaldo factory in Milan, where the Congress of the Italian Socialist Party were taking place – provided a new path that would have started with the fall of the De Mita's government and the formation of a cabinet with a social democrat-led transition, culminating in another Craxi's government, while Andreotti or Forlani would have been elected President of Italy in the 1992 presidential election.

As agreed, shortly after De Mita's government fell and on 22 July 1989 Andreotti was sworn in for the third time as prime minister.

Its purpose was to prepare for, and implement, armed resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest.