One indisputable Italian loser in the world war was the monarchy. In June 1944, as the Allied armies liberated Rome, Victor Emanuel surrendered his powers to his son Umberto, appointing him lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Had he abdicated and moved abroad, he might have given the crown some time to recover the popularity which his own behaviour had lost. Yet he insisted on remaining king and living near Naples, refusing to abdicate until a month before a referendum on the monarchy’s future was held in June 1946. Umberto thus had little chance to show himself as the decent, responsible, if rather limited prince that he was. In the ballot he received 10,700,000 votes, mainly in Naples and the south, where people seemed to be voting more for the monarchical idea than for the northern dynasty that had evicted their own kings. Yet 12,700,000 other citizens chose to vote for the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic. Although urged by some to stand firm and resist, Umberto decided his throne was not worth the bloodshed such a stance would have entailed; he therefore accepted the verdict and went into exile in Lisbon, a victim of the many mistakes made by his father. No male heirs of the Savoia were permitted to return to Italy until 2002, when they were allowed to do so on condition they renounced their claims to the throne. Soon after they came back, the family’s reputation hit a new low when Umberto’s violent and disreputable son, another Victor Emanuel, was arrested and charged with corruption and the recruitment of prostitutes for clients of a casino on Lake Lugano.
Until the summer of 1944 Marshal Badoglio had deluded himself into thinking he had a future as the prime minister of an anti-fascist Italy. But his past obviously made him objectionable to the new National Liberation Committee, the umbrella organization of the Resistance, which consisted of anti-fascist groups ranging in ideology from liberalism to communism. He was duly replaced by Ivanoe Bonomi, a mild and elderly figure of the moderate Left, an appointment that demonstrated a certain agreeable symmetry and an affirmation of democratic revival: the second last prime minister before Mussolini now became the second one after him. Bonomi lasted until the end of the war, when he was succeeded by Ferruccio Parri, a long-standing anti-fascist and a partisan leader from the Party of Action, the second largest group in the Resistance. Yet the new premier’s talents in guerrilla warfare were not matched by skills in politics, and after a few months he was supplanted by a christian democrat from the Trentino, Alcide De Gasperi, one of the great figures of Italian political history. From December 1945 De Gasperi led a coalition government that included the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti as minister of justice.
Elections for a constituent assembly were held on the day of the referendum on the monarchy for the explicit purpose of producing a new constitution. The principal victors were the Democrazia Cristiana (the christian democratic descendants of the pre-fascist Popular Party), which obtained 207 deputies of a total of 556, and the socialist and communist parties, which both gained more than 100 seats. In an augury for the future of republican Italy, the chief losers were the secular parties of the Centre and the Centre-Left. The Party of Action was decimated even though it had been prominent in the Resistance and some of its leaders had been opponents of Mussolini since the 1920s. So were the liberals, the heirs of the Risorgimento now being represented by just forty-one deputies. In 1949 liberalism received a consolation prize when the great economist, Luigi Einaudi, was elected first president of the republic, but it was already clear that it had no future as an independent force. As Luigi Barzini had warned Umberto shortly before the referendum, Italy was no longer in the hands of the people who had brought the Savoia to Rome. It was ‘in the hands of those who had nothing to do with the Risorgimento’, of the women who had not been allowed to vote, of the Catholics who had been told not to vote and of the poor who had been too poor to be enfranchised before 1913.6
The Constituent Assembly did its duty, its various parties being cooperative, deliberating with speed and producing a constitution that, if sometimes anodyne and uninspiring, was clearly democratic and anti-fascist. The rights and duties of citizens were defined, as were their civil and political liberties, and mention was made of the state’s obligation to address social and economic inequalities. As of old, the legislature would consist of two chambers, with the lower house again predominant, but the senate would now be almost entirely elected. Although both De Gasperi and Einaudi wanted a ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system, the assembly opted – as a precaution against any party gaining too much power – for proportional representation in multi-member constituencies. The head of state would be a president, who would enjoy less power than Victor Emanuel but more than a British monarch, and the head of government would be as usual the prime minister, the ‘president of the council of ministers’ (the cabinet). A glance at the roles of the various branches of government, including the judiciary, reveals why and how they have been able to restrain the activities of each other. The constitution may have been a charter for liberty but it also seemed a guarantor of weak government. The founding fathers of the Italian republic were apparently so anxious to prevent anyone from governing with too much power again that they created a constitution that made it difficult to govern at all. Endemic political instability was a result.
At the end of 1946 Pope Pius XII was urging De Gasperi to remove ‘godless’ communists and socialists from his government, but the prime minister resisted the pressure and waited until the following May before deciding to break up the coalition. At the spring elections of 1948 the christian democrats won an emphatic victory, gaining nearly half the vote and over half the seats, while the godless parties between them obtained less than a third of the votes cast. The cause of the Left was not helped by either a recent communist takeover in Prague or a split in the socialists, which prompted Giuseppe Saragat, a future president of the country, to lead the moderates into a new social democratic party. The christian democrats also possessed certain advantages of their own, even if few of their members could boast of having fought in the Resistance.† The party itself was a coalition ranging from the Right to the Centre-Left, but all factions were committed to representative government, and their belief in political liberty was symbolized by the word ‘LIBERTAS’ emblazoned on the party’s icon, a crusader shield. As the descendant of the Popular Party, which had won 100 seats in the 1919 elections, the christian democrats were assured of a mass following, and their conservative views on the family and the Church greatly appealed to newly enfranchised women voters.
One factor important to their success was the backing of the United States, which was eager to retain military bases in a democratic Italy as part of its strategy to contain the influence of the Soviet Union in Europe; as a result, large amounts of Marshall Aid were offered to Italy, and millions of dollars were paid annually to the anti-communist parties, principally to the christian democrats. Even more significant was the support of the pope and the Catholic Church. Although the Vatican had cooperated with the fascists, it had not much liked them, and it was delighted to have a christian democrat as prime minister for the first time. Papal encouragement was especially valuable in an era when most Italians were still practising Catholics. It gave the party not only the backing of hundreds of bishops and thousands of priests but the auxiliary assistance of the Catholic press and publishing houses, of the religious bodies that ran schools, hospitals and charities, and of a trade union, an association of small farmers and the nearly 3 million members of Catholic Action.
Alcide De Gasperi was an unusual politician, a Trentino whose political career had begun in 1911 when he had been elected a deputy for the parliament in Vienna. After his province had been transferred to Italy, he became a deputy for the Popular Party in the parliament in Rome, but his hostility to fascism led to his arrest and a period of imprisonment that lasted until the pope, Pius XI, secured his release; in 1929 the pontiff made him a librarian in the Vatican, where he remained until 1943. Towards the end of the Second World War De Gasperi re-entered politics, joining the Resistanc
e and reorganizing the popolari, who had been banned by Mussolini, as the Democrazia Cristiana (DC). A man of wisdom, honesty and sound judgement, this austere northerner eschewed party matters to concentrate on broader concerns, chiefly the need to return Italy to a state of international respectability, to bring it into the western fold, and to give it a novel role, no longer as a colonial power or a destabilizer of Europe but as a responsible participant in international affairs. Foreign policy would now be relatively straightforward, based on attachment to western Europe and, at least for a time, guidance by the United States. In 1949 Italy joined NATO and three years later the European Defence Community.
Carlo Sforza, a former and future foreign minister, declared in a book published in New York during the war that ‘the integrity of our national life and the future of our country hang on the coming of that free and federated Europe of which Mazzini was the first prophet’.8 In his view nationalism was out of date and ready to be jettisoned in favour of international cooperation. Einaudi and De Gasperi agreed, and the three of them helped steer Italy along an unfamiliar road. As a borderer from territory that had changed hands many times in its history, De Gasperi hoped and believed that European integration would prevent future wars as well as help solve some of Italy’s stoniest economic problems. In 1952, together with France, Germany and the Benelux countries, he took his nation into the European Coal and Steel Community which five years later became the European Economic Community. After nearly a century of costly endeavour trying to match the power of France and Germany, Italy was now on peaceful and equal terms with them as a founder member of the future European Union. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, led to a huge surge in exports over the following decade and gave under-employed southerners the chance to earn a living in the factories of northern Europe.
At the end of the war the great division in Italy had been one between fascists and anti-fascists, yet within a couple of years it had become one between communists and anti-communists. De Gasperi’s break with the Left, inevitable though it was, polarized the country. For Italians the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc thus became an internal reality as well as a global rivalry. In Germany communism and christian democracy were governing in two separate states, but in Italy they were competing in the same arena. As the ideology of each contestant was essentially international and even universal, Italian nationalism soon became, as Sforza had hoped, outmoded and limited chiefly to supporters of the neo-fascist MSI. For a century Italian rulers had tried to bully their subjects into becoming nationalists, most recently by dragging them into a war in which they had ended up fighting on both sides. Now most of the people were fed up with nationalism and all its trimmings; for years after the war designers did not even dare put the national flag on postage stamps. Not much of the Risorgimento – and even less of its rhetoric – was left after 1946. Liberal anti-clericalism had gone the same way as nationalism, the Piedmontese monarchy had also disappeared, and the parties descended from Cavour (the liberals) and Mazzini (the republicans) were pitifully reduced. The country’s chief political rivals were now parties formed after the First World War.
After breaking with the Left, De Gasperi governed for another six years in a coalition of christian democrats and the small parties of the Centre. He knew it would be fatal to take his party to the Right or to allow it to be too closely identified with the Church; thus he rejected heavy-handed pressure from the Vatican to form an alliance with the neo-fascists in Rome’s local elections in 1952. The following year, at the age of seventy-two, he resigned after a parliamentary vote and, a year further on, he died from a heart attack. Italy is not full of statues of De Gasperi or of streets named after him, but there is a memorable sculpture in his native Trento of the statesman declaiming between two vast triangles of bronze that remind one of Lorenzetti’s frescoes of the well-governed and badly governed cities in the town hall of Siena. The evil panel portrays the recent past with a dive bomber and a vampire bat flying above a scene of devastation, of destroyed buildings and a collapsed church tower, a wasteland peopled only by a dead soldier and a dying woman with her baby. The good panel indicates the present and the future, a land of happiness and prosperity, of churches, factories, ships and aeroplanes; in the foreground a mother is shown suckling her baby and being embraced by her son, while a man sits on a tractor, surrounded by his cattle and a horse that nuzzles his shoulder. Italy’s post-war revival was not quite like this, but the economic side of it was indisputably impressive.
De Gasperi was succeeded by lesser men, who continued to rule in coalitions and to try to limit the Vatican’s interference in politics. Their governments were seldom very energetic. According to Piero Ottone, a distinguished journalist, ministers rolled up at their offices in the late morning, made a few telephone calls, signed a couple of documents and then ‘dedicated their time to party matters, which for them were the most important. Spanish hours prevailed for the rest of the day, including the siesta.’9 Yet increased energy levels would not by themselves have remedied the inherent instability of government. In the forty years after De Gasperi, twenty-seven prime ministers were sworn in, all but two of them christian democrats. There was an innate weakness in the system, as there was in the French Fourth Republic, but Italy had no figure like de Gaulle either willing or able to challenge it. One problem was the weakness of the executive. Another was the electoral system itself. Proportional representation and the party list meant that candidates did not need to be liked or even known to be successful in their multi-member constituencies. They needed to be popular only with party leaders in Rome and party secretaries in the regions for them to gain a place high enough on the list to secure election. Ostensible loyalty to his party was thus essential for a deputy’s chances of re-election, but it was not necessary to demonstrate it at critical moments in parliament because the secret ballot allowed him to vote against party policy without anyone finding out; the budget bill was defeated seventeen times in 1988 because dissidents in the government coalition furtively voted against it.
For nearly half a century after 1945, the christian democrats were always in power and never in any real danger of being overthrown by a disunited Left. Without a single spell in opposition, they resembled a regime in which all the important decisions on policy and government are made through deals inside the party. The DC was divided into factions, known as correnti, usually grouped around such canny operators as the dynamic Tuscan Amintore Fanfani, and the artful Roman Giulio Andreotti, who was prime minister seven times, a cabinet minister for twenty-one years and a deputy continuously from 1946 to 1991, when he was appointed a life senator. Governments used to fall about once a year but never as a result of a vote of no confidence moved by the opposition in parliament. They fell because either a faction within the DC or a small party in the coalition (such as the liberals) withdrew its support, an action that persuaded the prime minister to resign without a parliamentary vote. This was followed by frantic negotiations among the same people and the same factions until they agreed on the next prime minister, who often turned out to be the old one leading a largely unchanged team of ministers. Such a system ensured that the chief skill a politician needed was not the statesmanship of De Gasperi but the subtlety of manoeuvre as exemplified by Andreotti.
As the century progressed, the christian democrats lost many of their natural supporters: there were far fewer small farmers and practising Catholics in 1980 than there had been in 1948. There were also fewer women who divided their day between their church and their kitchen and were prepared to follow the instructions of their priests. Yet the christian democrats remained the largest party because people were frightened of the alternative, the Communist Party, which by the mid-1970s was gaining three and a half times as many votes as the socialists. Politics were thus effectively paralysed. Italians turned out at elections in impressive numbers but they knew they were not voting for a change of government; at best they hoped their party might increase its vote by a
couple of percentage points. In the early years of the republic attempts had been made to end the paralysis by building a ‘Third Force’ of the secular Centre, a project supported by the weekly Il Mondo and by many of the country’s leading intellectuals. Yet loyalties to the Catholic and communist parties had been cemented so early that in the elections of 1953 the parties of a potential Third Force – the liberals, the republicans and the social democrats – between them received less than 10 per cent of the vote. Il Mondo closed down in 1966, its final issue leaving an unhappy last message: ‘What reigns in Italy above all else is the deep-rooted and penetrating presence of a soft and priestly secret government that conquers friends and foes alike and tends to enervate all initiative and all resistance.’10
COMMUNISTS
Communism attracted more adherents in Italy than in any other country in the West. By the end of 1944, just a year after it had emerged into the open, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) had half a million members, many of them living in the then German-occupied areas of the north. Thousands of young fascists mutated quickly into young communists, relishing their opposition to a defeated regime while appreciating the familiarities of discipline and authoritarianism offered by this alternative ‘system of truth’. In her novel La storia Elsa Morante captured this spirit in the character Nino, who becomes in turn a fascist, a partisan and a black marketeer although, whatever he is pretending to be, his behaviour is always an imitation of Mussolini.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 42