Antis' Inferno

Even Eternal Rome was beginning to wonder if it was eternal enough to outlast the filibuster in Italy's parliament. For 37 days the Communists had hog-tied the Chamber of Deputies with their desperate war against Premier Alcide de Gasperi's electoral reform bill.

The Reds proposed 2,300 separate amendments and wanted to debate them all. Night after night they sent a steady stream of speakers forward to keep parliament in session until dawn; when larynxes failed, they used fists, chair legs and football rushes. Once, as a vote approached on an important maneuver, Red Boss Palmiro Togliatti deployed a cordon of Communist deputies around the ballot box to keep others from voting. One by one, pro-government deputies managed to break through to drop small wooden balls (white for yes, black for no) into the box. Infuriated, the Reds tossed all the voting equipment into the air, kicked up a scuffle, then scurried around the floor picking up black balls.

Order was finally restored. When the tellers counted, they found that the Reds had surreptitiously packed in more black balls than there were deputies in the Chamber. The vote was declared invalid.

Deadly Adventure. The measure before the house was admittedly controversial, and inspired misgivings even among some of De Gasperi's Demo-Christian coalition. By a formula so complex that it took two mathematicians and a handful of political scientists three months to work it out, De Gasperi's proposal would give 64% of the seats in the Chamber to any party or coalition which wins more than 50% of the vote. De Gasperi, whose own devotion to minority rights was hardened during his long years in opposition to Mussolini, is reluctantly convinced that democracy can survive in Italy only if the majority gets a chance to govern, free from parliamentary harassment from representatives who are sworn enemies of parliamentary democracy. He fears in particular a cynical coalition of Italy's Communists (the strongest Red party in Western Europe, and the only one to gain strength at the polls in recent years) and the rising neoFascists. "To create in Italy a situation similar to that in France," warned Premier de Gasperi, ". . . would open the road to a deadly adventure."

Moving Furniture. To put an end to all the stalling, De Gasperi demanded a vote of confidence. That automatically restricted deputies to one final speech apiece, and inside & outside the Chamber Togliatti's toughs made the most of it. They touched off a riotous general strike which filled the streets of Italy's biggest cities with the sounds of surging crowds, police sirens and thudding truncheons. As the Chamber went into a nonstop session, the Reds monopolized the sofas and emergency cots set up in the Chamber, so that tired non-Communist deputies could not catch cat naps.

But finally, at 5 o'clock one morning last week, after 67 hours of unrelieved parliamentary inferno, the Chamber came to a vote. The 180 Communists and fellow-traveling Socialists of Pietro Nenni's faction marched out without voting. The rest voted 339 to 25 to approve the electoral reform bill, and sent it on to the Senate. Foresighted attendants transferred the emergency cots to the anterooms of the Senate.

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