Letter from Rome

The Italians almost certainly lack the imagination to replace their ailing republic with anything better—or with anything else—in the foreseeable future. In other countries, the bitterness and violence which have marked the chronic strikes, riots and guerrilla strife of Italy’s “long hot autumn” and no less hot winter would portend speedy changes of a drastic order. But alternatives seem few in this NATO state, and the chances are that the Repubblica will survive another year to see its 25th anniversary, deservedly or not, plausibly or not.

That occasion, if it comes, will bring a reminder of the fraudulent plebiscite that dissolved the anti-Communist bastion of the monarchy and led to the Constituent Assembly in which Palmiro Togliatti and his Partito Communista Italiano shared with the newly triumphant Catholics the preparation of the postwar constitution. The nation’s current ills have grown from an error committed at that moment by the premier of the late Forties and Fifties, Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi, who failed to outlaw the Communist Party at the outset (as Adenauer did in Germany), and who permitted Togliatti’s followers to acquire a permanent and large role in the “partyocracy” which succeeded fascism and which closely resembles the oligarchy of parties whose malfunction in 1922 brought Mussolini to power.

JF

About the Author

J. D. Futch

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The Italians almost certainly lack the imagination to replace their ailing republic with anything better—or with anything else—in the foreseeable future. In other countries, the bitterness and violence which have marked the chronic strikes, riots and guerrilla strife of Italy’s “long hot autumn” and no less hot winter would portend speedy changes of a drastic order. But alternatives seem few in this NATO state, and the chances are that the Repubblica will survive another year to see its 25th anniversary, deservedly or not, plausibly or not.

That occasion, if it comes, will bring a reminder of the fraudulent plebiscite that dissolved the anti-Communist bastion of the monarchy and led to the Constituent Assembly in which Palmiro Togliatti and his Partito Communista Italiano shared with the newly triumphant Catholics the preparation of the postwar constitution. The nation’s current ills have grown from an error committed at that moment by the premier of the late Forties and Fifties, Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi, who failed to outlaw the Communist Party at the outset (as Adenauer did in Germany), and who permitted Togliatti’s followers to acquire a permanent and large role in the “partyocracy” which succeeded fascism and which closely resembles the oligarchy of parties whose malfunction in 1922 brought Mussolini to power.