Politicians and people
Peter Nichols
Rome I sat for an hour each morning, rather early, during Christmas week earphoned in a studio discussing what was in the newspapers that day with listeners who rang the Italian Radio's number. The effect was of sitting in a chair through which electric shocks were passing, not deadly, sometimes pleasant and always a stimulating prelude to the then, already, imminent fall of the country's thirty-ninth government since Fascism's end.
The tension was by no means imaginary.
Some callers were bewildered, some indignant, some angry: almost all of them strongly felt the need to know more of what was happening and why, and what was going to happen. The impression was of ordinary people who now want to understand more and assert themselves more. `Surely it is wrong', said a woman who claimed to know nothing about anything (which is still the stratagem some Italian women feel is necessary to gain a hearing) `surely it is wrong to treat the killing of a fascist as a lesser crime than shooting some one on the far left?'
Another woman: 'My husband is afraid of making a mistake because he would lose his job. Why don't the politicians who have brought us to this mess lose theirs?' A Christian Democrat senator telephoned with a very valid point about the constitution and general elections but he went on rather long. Within minutes, the telephones were practically dancing about with protests from listeners who had heard enough from politicians . . . `Isn't this supposed to be our chance to be heard?'.
The most difficult film to see on the weekend that the government resigned because of its drawing power is called `Forza Italia'. It is a collection of old newsreels and material which had been cut and somehow preserved, all of it intended by sharp editing to make leading Christian Democrats from the late De Gasperi on look ridiculous.
A wicked shot of De Gasperi, who was the most impressive of Italy's postwar leaders, as he takes a cheque from the Americans (presumably his historic acceptance of Marshall Aid) is a reminder that it is almost thirty years since he expelled the communists and socialists from his government. He thus inaugurated nearly three decades of rule by the Christian Democrats with help, at one time or another, from every other party in Parliament with the exception of the Communists.
The rule was broken for the first time officially after the general election in June 1976, The increased Communist strength brought them to the semi-respectability of abstaining on the vote of confidence in the new Christian Democrat minority administration and, some months later, a hand in drafting the government's programme. They were one of five parties (apart from the Christian Democrats themselves) whose abstentions guaranteed the government's parliamentary survival.
This ingenious system of `no-no confidence' allowed parliamentary government to continue despite the impossibility of forming a homogeneous majority—meaning without the communists. There was in fact, and there still is, a non-communist majority in parliament. But it could only become the basis of an executive if the socialists agreed to join a coalition without the Communists. They would not do so in June 1976. In the meantime the Republicans have called for an emergency administration to meet the country's economic crisis with the full participation of the Communists. Inevitably, the Communists themselves finally took up the cry of their entry into an emergency administration. And so last Monday Signor Giulio Andreotti bowed to the inevitable and resigned.
The essential point which was quite clear even before he resigned was that the Communists would not in fact be entering government. The Christian Democrats, who remain the largest party, rejected the proposal for an emergency government.
The Vatican let it be known that Communist participation in government was unthinkable without first calling elections, and Washington issued the famous declaration against Communist influence in Italian governmental affairs.
The alternatives are two: A new arrangement very similar to the old one, by which a group of parties support a minority executive, or general elections. Most people think that an election would worsen the situation because both Christian Democrats and Communists would probably go ahead at the expense of the smaller parties, who now have a much more important role than in the past. They are now the ball-bearings which keep the two big parties apart and the system turning.
The 1976 system was in fact not at all bad, given the difficulties. It avoided a split between the left and the rest which would have brought ungovernability to the country, and it gave breathing space to the Republicans, Socialists, Social Democrats and Liberals. The opposition was almost non-existent except for the irritant tactics of the Radicals and, at the other extreme, the Neo-fascists.
But, as compensation, differences within individual parties, and particularly within the two main parties, grew stronger than before, a phenomenon which fulfilled to some degree an official opposition's function of criticism. Apart from the virtue drawn from necessity, the system could claim origins in Italian political tradition which is much less rooted than the AngloSaxon tradition in the theory of alternative, and alternating governments. The problem seems to be two-fold: how to adapt the 1976 arrangement in such a way as to convince the Communist rank and file that their party's views have been acted on, while reassuring the Christian Democrats that nothing new has occurred. The second element is to decide whether Signor Andreotti should carry on or another prime minister be chosen. But. . .and this is the heart of the matter: how do you explain this, simply, on the telephone, or by any other means for that matter, to citizens with a fresh interest, an indignant interest, at times a despairing interest, in what is happening to their country? How can this subtlety and undoubted political acumen be shown to be relevant to urgent problems of law and order, of increasing political violence, unemployment and an uncertain future?
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