Cabinet Maker

On the shaky scaffolding of Italian politics, Premier Alcide de Gasperi worked warily to mortar together a new government for Italy, his eighth since the war. He could no longer count on the three small parties of his coalition to help carry the hod. Two were so hurt by the June elections that they barely counted any more, and the Democratic Socialists of Giuseppe Saragat, cut down to 19 seats, decided to quit the team.

The Premier's Christian Democrats lacked a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. But he knew that to form a democratic cabinet he was going to have to go it alone with the Christian Democrats, and trust that some of those who did not like it would be patriotic enough to refrain from voting against it when chaos was the only alternative.

"Man to Man." De Gasperi took his time. First, he went through the formality of inviting all party leaders to his office in the Viminale Palace, where he could chat with men he normally saw only at scowling distance across the desks of the Chamber of Deputies. Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti (143 seats) came first --he had not sat down with De Gasperi since the day in 1947 when De Gasperi threw the Reds out of his coalition. "We talked man to man." said De Gasperi later, but Togliatti kept "avoiding clarity." Achille Lauro, leader of the Monarchists (40 seats), was equally vague. How did he propose to restore a king to Italy? Lauro did not know. The leaders of the Neo-Fascists (29 seats) came equipped with "more sentiment than ideas." They talked of Trieste, reported De Gasperi, "in the friendly way all Italians talk about Trieste."

With Pietro Nenni, clever leader of the fellow-traveling Socialists (75 seats), De Gasperi had his longest talk. The two spoke with the intimate second-person "tu" a reminder of the days they spent together as wartime anti-Fascist refugees in the Vatican. Of course, said Nenni, he did not expect De Gasperi to denounce the North Atlantic pact, but was it necessary to show such "excessive zeal" in promoting it? De Gasperi asked if Nenni's Socialists are really as independent of Togliatti's Reds as they profess. Replied Nenni frankly: if the Communists were to take power in Italy, the Socialists would "regard it serenely."

Balance of Forces. All the chatting merely confirmed what De Gasperi had known--democracy would not compromise with the right and left extremists without compromising Italy's future. The Premier retired to his villa on Lake Albano for a few days to ponder. Last week he came back and handed over to President Luigi Einaudi his list of 17 cabinet ministers who, if confirmed by the Chamber, will govern Italy. To no one's surprise, it was a completely Demo-Christian cabinet, with De Gasperi, as before, keeping the Foreign Ministry for himself. But there was one surprise: Mario Scelba, the tough Sicilian Minister of Interior, who policed Italy to a high state of law & order, was missing from the list. Scelba refused to serve again, insisting on taking the blame for the electoral reform law which he sponsored, and which became a harmful anti-De Gasperi campaign issue. In Scelba's place goes former Agricultural Minister Amintore Fanfani, who represents the party's left wing. To offset giving so crucial a ministry to the left, De Gasperi renamed hard-money man Giuseppe Pella to the Finance Ministry.

It was not a government designed to push vigorously into experiment or controversy, but a balance of forces built simply to survive, and to save Italy from a succession of cabinet crises. Experts predicted that the old parliamentarian, despite his lack of a solid majority, would squeak it through. Their confidence was jolted by an ill-timed piece of news from Washington: the U.S., Britain and France had invited Tito's Yugoslavia to a conference over mutual military matters. The spectacle of the West cuddling up to the hated Yugoslavs, without first making them hand over Trieste to Italy, blew up a storm in Italy. De Gasperi would probably have to ride this strong wind, if he hoped to survive it.

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