Ring Out the Old

The spare, stooped leader of postwar Italian democracy stepped down last week out of active politics. Before a meeting of his party's National Council, Alcide de Gasperi, 73, for eight crucial years his country's Premier, relinquished the powerful key job of secretary general of the Christian Democrats and took the purely honorary post of president of the party council.

Youth was knocking at the door, politely but firmly. In as party secretary general stepped brisk, bright, 46-year-old Amintore Fanfani, an economist with a flair for politics and an eye for power. Fanfani led his Democratic Initiative faction to a clean sweep of party offices at Naples a month ago, thus made himself De Gasperi's logical successor (TIME, July 12). He knows the government like a stock table, having served in six cabinets as Minister of Labor, Agriculture and Interior and briefly as Premier earlier this year. "I am sure," De Gasperi once prophesied, "that one of these days I will open the door to my study and find Fanfani sitting at my desk."

Last week, as Fanfani took the desk, he moved with the smooth punctilio that Italians appreciate and practice. Some pleasant "understandings" were quietly arranged. First Fanfani "urged" De Gasperi to continue as party secretary, and professed to be surprised when the old man said no. Presumably Fanfani then promised to back De Gasperi for President of Italy, a job with more prestige than power, which will probably fall vacant when 81-year-old Luigi Einaudi finishes his seven-year term next May. Fanfani also reportedly gave assurances of continued backing to the government of fellow Demo-Christian Mario Scelba, and promised that for the next year, at least, he would not seek public office. He arranged for the Vatican's vital nihil obstat, delivered by a spokesman: "The Vatican welcomes this induction of new energy in the Christian Democratic Party, without of course disparaging for one moment the paramount merits of the man who has now decided to step into the background." Vatican approval ended the risk that the party's right wing and Luigi Gedda's Catholic Action group would defy Fanfani.

At the meeting of the National Council, Fanfani called De Gasperi "our teacher and guide," Scelba "my dear friend," and proposed that the council elect to membership his two chief opponents, Giuseppe Pella of the Demo-Christian right wing, and Giovanni Gronchi of the left, who had been passed over at Naples. In his short acceptance speech, Fanfani used the word friend 50 times. His friendliness proved contagious: the changeover was completely harmonious.

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