The Gadfly

With election day only three weeks off, the fog of political oratory shrouded the Italian peninsula. In one 24-hr, period last week Italy was subjected to no less than 20,000 campaign speeches. To some of the candidates it seemed that the bulk of these had been delivered by a single man: brilliant, persuasive Liberal Party Leader Giovanni Malagodi, 53.

Malagodi's party, which has a proud past, is today one of the smallest (13 seats) in Italy's Chamber of Deputies, cannot muster sufficient money or manpower to match the lavish campaign efforts of its bigger rivals. To compensate, hard-driving Giovanni Malagodi has taken up a device foreign to Italian politics--the whistle-stop tour. Since last October, traveling alone, he has spoken, rain or shine, in hundreds of cities, towns and villages from Sicily to Piedmont. In the process, his level, rasping voice has won more attention than that of any other Italian politician.

Down the Middle. All this has come as a rude shock to opposition politicians. The party which Malagodi heads is the heir to the one that made Italy a nation, and, until the advent of Mussolini, most of Italy's Premiers called themselves Liberals. But in 1952, when Malagodi joined the party, it was, says one of its members, "in the seventh day of pneumonia." Thanks to his family's longtime prominence in Liberal politics and his own sharp intelligence--he was general manager of Milan's giant Banca Commerciale Italiana at 29--stocky Giovanni Malagodi rose to secretary-general of the party within two years. Ignoring the siren calls from left and far right, Malagodi and his colleagues hammered out a Liberal platform that, almost alone in Italian politics, opposes both private and state monopoly, and favors free play for free enterprise.

Lions & Asses. Dry and dignified in manner, Whistle Stopper Malagodi nonetheless delivers incisive assaults. Of the Communists he says: "They hold one-third of the Italian electorate prisoner in the grip of a foreign ideology. We must free them for the politics of free men." Wealthy Monarchist Achille Lauro (TIME, Dec. 30), whose campaign caravan includes two lion cubs, is dismissed by Malagodi with the private comment: "He may travel with lions, but he has asses for candidates." Some of Malagodi's sharpest blows have been struck at the Christian Democrats, whose stand on church v. state has become a hot political issue since the trial of the Bishop of Prato (TIME, March 10). Malagodi points out that the Liberals are Catholics themselves, but "believe that religion is menaced only by those who would make it an instrument of political tyranny."

Fanfani's Worry. This gadfly role has drawn upon Malagodi the combined fire of all Italy's major parties. The Communists rarely let a day pass without belaboring him as "a tool of big business." Amintore Fanfani, the busy little boss of the Christian Democrats, has publicly threatened to exclude the Liberals from future Cabinets. (Says Malagodi, chortling, "Fanfani's palms are sweating.")

Chances are that Fanfani is indeed sweating. Under Italy's new electoral law--a complex melange of straight and proportional representation--the Communists and Christian Democrats will have to increase their ballot by between 500,000 and 1,000,000 votes in order not to lose parliamentary seats. By contrast, an increase of only 400,000 votes--half what they polled in the last election-could double the number of Liberal seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

Should that happen--and many Italian pundits believe it will--the Christian Democrats, for all Fanfani's threats, will almost certainly need Liberal support to form a government, and to obtain it will have to pay more heed to the gadfly voice of Giovanni Malagodi. "The reawakening of the Liberal Party," declared Rome's Il Messaggero last week, "constitutes the one new fact in this campaign . . . and it augurs well for Italian democracy."

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