After Eight Years

The Republic of Italy has been operating under a constitution for eight years, but has yet to establish the Supreme Court which the constitution provides for. Result: many constitutional provisions remain uninterpreted, and old Fascist laws continue to encumber the administration of Italian justice.

The difficulty has been that a 1953 law requires that five of the 15 judges should be named by a three-fifths majority of both houses of Parliament sitting in joint session. Such a majority might have been found if the government and the right-wing Monarchists and Fascists could ever agree. The only other way was for the government to accept the support of Communist Palmiro Togliatti or his fellow-travelling sidekick, Socialist Pietro Nenni. The situation was made to order for Stalin's Prizewinner Nenni, who has been trying to insinuate himself into a popular front with the Christian Democrats ever since he came back from his latest trip to Moscow last October.

Nenni knew that Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi was eager to get a court appointed.* Nenni went to work carefully, dangling his 100-odd votes before the Christian Democratic majority. When the Italian Parliament at last gathered in joint session. Nenni volunteered all his bloc's votes to elect a Christian Democratic candidate as the first judge. Grateful Demo-Christians then reciprocated by voting with Nenni to elect his candidate for the second court position. Then the third and fourth judges, one a Demo-Christian, the other a Liberal, were elected, with Nenni and his Christian Democratic allies working smoothly together.

The difficulty came with Judge No. 5. Nenni insisted that he had to defer to his friends the Communists, who insisted on a Communist judge. At this point Christian Democratic Boss Amintore Fanfani objected: "Even if they propose a monsignor, we will never vote for him!" Last week Communist Chief Togliatti finally relented, provided that the fifth and final judgeship should go to someone "acceptable" to Communist members of the Chamber.

That someone proved to be Nicola Jaeger, a professor of law at the University of Milan, once a Protestant but now converted to Catholicism, once a Communist but now allegedly a political neutral. "The name of Jaeger corresponds to our requirements and we accept it," said Togliatti. The bench was complete, and the deed was done. Angrily the extreme rightists strode from the Chamber. Declared Nenni jubilantly: "Our party has done the most in bringing about the constitutional court."

* The President picks five of the remaining ten judges; the last five are nominated by the judiciary.

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