On the Eve

As Italy's first general-election campaign since 1948 went into the final week, two of the extremists' leaders, Communist Palmiro Togliatti and Monarchist Achille Lauro, took to their beds, white with exhaustion, but Premier Alcide de Gasperi, thinner and older (72) than either, seemed to gain strength. He abandoned his campaign train and took to the air, flying to Sardinia and Sicily to rally the voters.

Expected to win victory narrowly--51-55% of the expected 26 million votes --De Gasperi realized that the great danger was indifference; seeing no chance of a Communist victory this year, the complacent might simply stay home June 7 and 8. A pro-Demochristian poster addressed itself to this apathy: HE WHO VOTES NOT, VOTES COMMUNIST.

Should De Gasperi's four-party coalition win a bare majority, the new electoral-bonus law would automatically give him 65% of the 590 Chamber seats, a comfortable margin. If he did not, would De Gasperi make a deal with the Monarchists to organize a majority, as the Monarchists confidently seemed to expect? At Cagliari, De Gasperi was explicit: he would quit instead. "A government half Republican and half Monarchist," said he, would be "a government without principle, a confused government."

De Gasperi's forces shrewdly saved their maximum effort until the last. Clemente Cardinal Micara, second-ranking member of the College of Cardinals and pastoral leader of Rome's 500 churches, exhorted his people: "Vote well, vote as Catholics, vote as Romans." In an address at the annual dinner of the American Chamber of Commerce in Milan, newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce made sure that every Italian voter understood where the U.S., which has given Italy $3 billion in aid since war's end, takes its stand. After speaking of past U.S. help to Italy, the ambassador added: "But if--I am required in all honesty to say this--but if . . . the Italian people should fall unhappy victims to the wiles of totalitarianism of the right or the left . . . there would follow--logically and tragically--grave consequences for this intimate and warm cooperation we now enjoy."

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