Will Italian Democracy Survive?

After fifteen years of relative quiet and stability, Italy has returned to the front line of Cold War struggle in the wake of April’s general election. If Americans remember anything at all of Italy’s political crisis of the first postwar years, they associate it with the subversion of the monarchy in 1946 and the crucial election of 1948 when the Communists made what many feared would become their first successful bid for power through democratic rather than revolutionary means. Thwarted on that occasion by the combativeness and solidarity of the (then) militantly anti-Communist Catholic party—la Democrazia Cristiana—the followers of Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti were banished to the political wilderness, and the country settled down to a sort of old time French-style parliamentary government and to the enjoyment of its own version of West Germany’s “economic miracle.” Today these gains are in jeopardy once more, and Italy’s political future has become one of the most embarrassing question marks in NATO Europe.

The current post-election crisis, momentarily concealed in June by the creation of Giovanni Leone’s stopgap administrative cabinet, became acute—for Americans, read “visible”—with the April election in which the Christian Democrats lost well over a half million votes and the Communists picked up more than a million. In balloting for the Chamber of Deputies, the Communists and their frequent fellow travelers, the Nenni Socialists, rolled up a popular vote total of 39.1 per cent (against 38.3 per cent for the Christian Democrats). These have been the first fruits of the aperturista policy forced upon the Democrazia Cristiana by its dominant left wing in the past three years. But the origins of the present unhappy situation cannot be sought alone in Amintore Fanfani’s and Aldo Moro’s “opening to the Left.” The apertura a sinistra has been the climax, not the cause, of a crisis dating back to pre-Fascist years.

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David Futch

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After fifteen years of relative quiet and stability, Italy has returned to the front line of Cold War struggle in the wake of April’s general election. If Americans remember anything at all of Italy’s political crisis of the first postwar years, they associate it with the subversion of the monarchy in 1946 and the crucial election of 1948 when the Communists made what many feared would become their first successful bid for power through democratic rather than revolutionary means. Thwarted on that occasion by the combativeness and solidarity of the (then) militantly anti-Communist Catholic party—la Democrazia Cristiana—the followers of Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti were banished to the political wilderness, and the country settled down to a sort of old time French-style parliamentary government and to the enjoyment of its own version of West Germany’s “economic miracle.” Today these gains are in jeopardy once more, and Italy’s political future has become one of the most embarrassing question marks in NATO Europe.

The current post-election crisis, momentarily concealed in June by the creation of Giovanni Leone’s stopgap administrative cabinet, became acute—for Americans, read “visible”—with the April election in which the Christian Democrats lost well over a half million votes and the Communists picked up more than a million. In balloting for the Chamber of Deputies, the Communists and their frequent fellow travelers, the Nenni Socialists, rolled up a popular vote total of 39.1 per cent (against 38.3 per cent for the Christian Democrats). These have been the first fruits of the aperturista policy forced upon the Democrazia Cristiana by its dominant left wing in the past three years. But the origins of the present unhappy situation cannot be sought alone in Amintore Fanfani’s and Aldo Moro’s “opening to the Left.” The apertura a sinistra has been the climax, not the cause, of a crisis dating back to pre-Fascist years.