The Campaign Begins

Politics erupted the length of Italy last week, with a lava flow of candidates, party slogans and oratory. For all its ancient past, Italy has been a united nation for barely a century, and a republic for only seven years. This year's national election, the first since 1948, brought out 8,500 candidates for 590 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 237 seats in the Senate.

Election day was seven weeks off, but on the campaign's first Sunday, Italians from the shore of Como to the slums of Palermo gathered at a record 2,300 political rallies. Young volunteers rushed about with paintbrushes, paste pots and bills, to plaster Italy's piazze and palazzi, walls and ruins with the confusingly mixed-up slogans and emblems of about 18 different political parties. (Example: one party flaunted the rising sun, a second a full sun, a third the setting sun; at least three small parties encroached on the Communists' hammer & sickle.) There were some stunt candidacies (Tenor Beniamino Gigli, Bicyclist Alfredo Binda) and some frivolous parties (The Movement for Divorce, The Party of the Beefsteak), but basically the campaign would be a deadly political fight between the democratic center and the two anti-democratic extremes in Italian politics.

Left, Right & Center. On the side of parliamentary government: the Democratic Christian (Catholic) Party and three other middle-of-the-road parties which have been governing Italy since 1948 under the coalition cabinet of 72-year-old Demo-Christian Premier Alcide de Gasperi. Strength at the last election: about 62% of the total vote.

On the extreme left: Palmiro Togliatti's Communists, Pietro Nenni's fellow-traveling "Socialists" and their splinter-party allies. Strength at the last election: 31% (but believed by the experts to have gained some strength since).

On the extreme right: the ground-gaining Monarchists and Neo-Fascist parties, divided on fine points of antitotalitarianism, but united in spirit against parliamentary government. Their strength: relatively untested, but possibly formidable.

Under the election reform law pushed through Parliament over strenuous left & right delaying tactics, the Demo-Christian coalition can be sure of an ample majority in Parliament (64%) if it can win but 50.1% of the vote next June 7. The Communists hope to make an effective majority impossible by keeping the center's vote below 50.1%; the Monarchists and Fascists hope to draw enough to force De Gasperi to seek their help--in return for concessions to the right--to form a new government.

"Honest Men Know." For dauntless Alcide de Gasperi, the only choice is to fight it out on both fronts. To a huge crowd at Rome's Basilica of Massenzio last week, De Gasperi's strong-willed Interior Minister, Mario Scelba, fired the opening barrage. "If you want Communist dictatorship," said he, "vote Communist or [Nenni] Socialist. If you want adventurers to run the government and repeat all the errors of the past, then vote for the Monarchists and MSI [Neo-Fascists]. But honest men know that democracy, with all its deficiencies, is always better than totalitarianism of either right or left."

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