Right Turn

In Italy's financial capital of Milan last week, a lethargic stock market suddenly rallied. Conservative Italian newspapers congratulated the nation's politicians on their good sense. Ostensible cause for the rejoicing: the appointment of 68-year-old Antonio Segni as Italy's new Premier. A more fundamental cause: the fact that after months of talk about an inevitable drift toward socialism, Italian politics had taken a sharp right turn.

When proud little Amintore Fanfani resigned as Premier three weeks ago, Italy's big Christian Democratic Party seemed hopelessly divided against itself and listing to the left. The Christian Democrats lack 26 votes of a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, and Fanfani was kept in office only by the support of Giuseppe Saragat's Social Democrats. When some of the Social Democrats, hoodwinked by Red-lining Pietro Nenni's latest simulated split with the Communists, began to negotiate a deal with Nenni's Socialists, Fanfani was finished. After days of maneuvering, President Giovanni Gronchi (who would like to see the Christian Democrats ally themselves with Nenni in an "opening to the left") had to call upon a Premier agreeable to Italy's right as well as acceptable to the left. Virtually the only man who filled the bill was wispy, courtly Sardinian Segni, who rarely provokes critics and never answers them.

Best known for his successful campaign to push through Italy's liberal land reform law, Segni in 1955 put together a Cabinet that lasted longer (22 months) than any since the heyday of the late Alcide de Gasperi. This time, with a Cabinet of Christian Democrats only, he hopes to be invested with the help, or the helpful abstention, of all Italy's right-wing parties, including the Liberals, Monarchists, and neoFascists.

Segni's critics say that his chief attraction, aside from his kindly personality, is his scrupulous avoidance of vigorous action. But his patchwork Cabinet may be around awhile nonetheless. Among his fellow politicians he is known as "the cracked vase"--an allusion to an Italian proverb which says that a cracked vase often outlasts an uncracked one because everybody handles it so tenderly.

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