One Liter of Wine

After ten years of nationhood, the Republic of Italy last week voted in numbers that might shame older democracies. On a leisurely, balmy Sunday, nearly 24 million Italians, 91.1% of the electorate, trooped to the polls to vote for mayors and councilmen in Italy's 7,143 communes. From a welter of confused and overlapping statistics emerged one clear fact: the Christian Democratic party, generally supposed to have been losing ground with the voters, is still the choice of more Italians than any other party, and has actually picked up a few percentage points since 1951.

For Premier Antonio Segni's government, it was a welcome verdict of approval, and Christian Democratic strategists calculated happily that if national elections were held now, the government would considerably bolster its slim, 16-vote majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Torn by the denigration-of-Stalin issue, Palmiro Togliatti's Communists lost more heavily than expected--several hundred thousand votes. But what Togliatti lost, his Socialist ally Pietro Nenni picked up. "It is like having a liter of wine and two bottles," said one former Communist cynically. "You may pour wine from one bottle to another, or back and forth as you like, but you still have the liter." One Italian voter in three was still voting the Communist line.

The Lesser Reward. Unfortunately the Christian Democratic victory did not bring equivalent rewards. Deprived of the electoral bonus which in 1951 gave two-thirds of the seats to the party polling the most votes, the Christian Democrats found themselves in many cities polling more votes but losing seats. In Turin, Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Rome, the Chris tian Democrats lost their legislative majority, and stood in need of allies. to govern. In Florence Mayor Giorgio La Pira, Florence's busy little friend of the poor, polled more votes than any mayor ever had, but ended with only 25 city council seats out of 60, v. 31 in 1951. In Rome the Christian Democrats increased their vote by 13 percent but lost twelve of their 39 seats. In Bologna, the only city over 250,000 to go Communist, burly Red Mayor Giuseppe Dozza routed his ascetic challenger, Giuseppe Dossetti. In Naples free-spending Millionaire-Monarchist Achille Lauro won so resoundingly that newspapers dubbed him "Achille the First, King of Naples."

In many cities where their plurality did not win them control, the Christian Democrats and their coalition partners will be forced to make alliances, either tacit or actual. To most left-of-center Christian Democrats, alliances with the Monarchists and Neo-Fascists are distasteful.

The Red Devil. There is one other choice: alliance with the fellow-traveling Nenni Socialists. "The Christian Democrats must reckon with us, and we must reckon with them," Nenni said expansively. "Our terms will not be exorbitant."

So far, Christian Democratic Party Boss Amintore Fanfani has steadfastly refused any such "opening to the left" with Nenni until Nenni breaks his "unity of action" pact with the Communists. But at week's end another partner in the Christian Democratic coalition, the Saragat Socialists (who broke with Nenni nine years ago on the very issue of his Red allegiance), suddenly accepted Nenni's invitation to talk things over, while stoutly insisting that this did not mean any change in their determination to avoid all contact with Nenni's Red allies.

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