Those Confusing Elections

The Italian parliamentary elections are hard upon us and they are a nightmare for the political prognosticator. The field is crowded, and confused. Thirty-seven million Italian voters are being asked to choose nearly a thousand legislators, including 330 new senators, from a slate of seven thousand candidates representing eight major parties and a host of minor ones. The May 7 election was called, a full year ahead of schedule, when President Giovanni Leone concluded, early in March, that no workable cabinet could be put together. For the past two months Italy has been ruled by a caretaker government of Christian Democrats headed by Giulio Andreotti.

In the quarter-century following World War II, Italy staged an economic miracle that transformed it from a poor agricultural state into seventh among the industrial nations of the world. Then, in the late Sixties, things began to go sour. Rolling strikes, social unrest and street violence slowed its economic growth; the Christian Democratic Party, which had provided the leadership since the war, split into bitter, warring factions. On top of this, the great battle over the new divorce law inflamed historic hostilities between Church and State.

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Carlo Colonna

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The Italian parliamentary elections are hard upon us and they are a nightmare for the political prognosticator. The field is crowded, and confused. Thirty-seven million Italian voters are being asked to choose nearly a thousand legislators, including 330 new senators, from a slate of seven thousand candidates representing eight major parties and a host of minor ones. The May 7 election was called, a full year ahead of schedule, when President Giovanni Leone concluded, early in March, that no workable cabinet could be put together. For the past two months Italy has been ruled by a caretaker government of Christian Democrats headed by Giulio Andreotti.

In the quarter-century following World War II, Italy staged an economic miracle that transformed it from a poor agricultural state into seventh among the industrial nations of the world. Then, in the late Sixties, things began to go sour. Rolling strikes, social unrest and street violence slowed its economic growth; the Christian Democratic Party, which had provided the leadership since the war, split into bitter, warring factions. On top of this, the great battle over the new divorce law inflamed historic hostilities between Church and State.