Elections in Italy
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
Elections in Italy Socialist setback is coupled with Communist gains on its left, Social Democratic gains on its right By Silvio F. Senigallia Rome The nation-wide administrative elections held...
...The Socialists suffered a tiny percentage loss, getting 226,000 fewer votes than in 1958, dropping from 14.7 to 14.4 per cent...
...the Socialists, who, despite a greater political autonomy, are still closely tied with the Communists, received 14.7 per cent...
...Elections in Italy Socialist setback is coupled with Communist gains on its left, Social Democratic gains on its right By Silvio F. Senigallia Rome The nation-wide administrative elections held in Italy just two days before the U. S. Presidential election provided the political observers with few new significant trends...
...First, it must be kept in mind that 15 years after the end of the war and the advent of a democratic Government, Italy's democratic parties still hold a very narrow margin of supremacy over groups inspired by totalitarian ideologies and their allies...
...Furthermore, some 50 per cent of the Socialist Senators and Deputies belong to the pro-Communist wing of the party...
...Neo-Fascist MSI, absorbing most of the votes lost by the Monarchists and gaining heavily in the city of Rome, went from 4.6 to 5.9 per cent...
...A third reason has to do with the Socialist party...
...Add to that the rather insignificant Monarchist party, theoretically opposed to a republican form of government, which got 4.7 per cent, and you can easily see that the total strength of the democratic and republican parties is barely above the majority mark...
...The importance of this apparently minor setback comes into focus only if we keep in mind that the great majority of political observers had predicted a Socialist gain of about half a million votes, inasmuch as the Socialists were allied with the tiny Radical party and since 1958 had absorbed a portion of the Social Democratic left wing...
...Consequently, every election is a vitally important test of the stability of democracy in Italy...
...To the surprise of some observers, right-of-center Liberals and left-of-center Social Democrats, both supporting the Fanfani all-Christian Democratic Government, scored important percentage gains, 3.4 to 4.0 and 4.7 to 5.7 per cent respectively...
...Taking the provincial election results as the most accurate gauge, and comparing them with the 1958 returns, the following facts emerge: • The Communist party went from 23.0 to 24.5 per cent...
...and the neo-Fascists 4.6 per cent...
...As usual, all the parties juggled the statistical data, the percentages and the comparisons with previous elections to indicate that they had won, with the sole exception of the Monarchist party, which took such a beating that it was impossible to disguise it...
...In the last political elections, held in 1958, the Communists had 23 per cent of the vote...
...Second, the November 6 elections came only three months after a serious political crisis, which revealed the persistence of a deep split within the leading Christian Democratic party, and after the seating of a new Cabinet headed by brilliant but controversial Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani...
...It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the main cause for the still precarious condition of democracy in Italy may be ascribed to the role played by the Socialist party in the past 15 years —for Italy is the only Western country where the Socialist party is allied with the Communists...
...The Socialist setback, coupled with the gains scored by the Communists on their left and the Social Democrats on their right, seems to indicate that the Socialists must soon face a choice between a pro-Communist and a democratic stand...
...The reasons are manifold...
...Although the voting involved municipal and provincial councils, which deal mostly with local rather than national issues, administrative rather than political matters, the outcome was awaited with unusual interest and concern...
...The latter, incidentally, won approximately 43 per cent of the vote at the last party congress held in Naples in January 1959...
...Electoral evidence of the weakening of the Christian Democratic party, around which all Italy's postwar governments have been built, was feared by the supporters of the status quo...
...The Christian Democratic party remained, of course, the strongest political group, but, as customary in administrative elections, it lost some ground compared to 1958, going from 42.4 to 40.3...
...Despite recent frictions, which spring from an openly expressed desire for full autonomy on the part of large sectors of the Socialist party membership, close ties exist between the Communist and Socialist parties inside the Communist-dominated General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL), in a great number of local administrations and in agricultural cooperatives...
...Up to now the Socialists have been able to thrive on ambiguity, but apparently the policy of being allied with and opposed to the Communists, and of being reformist and maximalist at the same time, has reached the point of diminishing returns...
...Actually, this November's elections brought few if any surprises...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 46
