E D I T O R I A L


A memorable
transition

Foto Andreotti

 

     I feel one is duty-bound to mark the date, April 18 1948, with the full commemoration due to it and I am glad that this can be done without holding back with the same caution (which would be totally out of order here) that led people to minimize the event for years or forget it had happened at all so as not to offend one of the parties defeated in that day's decisive electoral test.
     But after half a century it is no longer a current affair but history. And events have been such as to remove any further doubt in judging those elections for Italy's first legislature as a Republic.
     I don't think there is any further liking or regret for the regimes of Stalinist discipline. There is no doubt about the Soviet Union's determinant role in delivering us of Nazism. What had to be waived - something other countries failed to do - was any ulterior extension of the dictatorship from Moscow model. What had happened so recently (before the Italian elections) in Czechoslovakia (March 1948) had visibly scared even sections of the population with underlying leftist orientations.

I feel one is duty-bound to mark the date, April 18 1948, with the full commemoration due to it and I am glad that this can be done without holding back with the same caution (which would be totally out of order here) that led people to minimize the event for years

     There is one point that should be cleared up right away. Many veterans of the Popular Front (Communist-Socialist alliance) claim that if they had won there would have been none of the involutionary trends that so devastated democratic orders elsewhere. Rejection of this theory definitely does not mean cataloguing Italian Communists and Socialists as supporters of the Red dictatorship. This could not even have been said of their counterparts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on. It is a gratuitous insult to them to sustain that the opposite is true in order to wash one's hands of them. What is more, perhaps the various Nennis themselves and Togliattis (Nenni, Socialist; Togliatti, Communist) would have been called to order and despatched to the sidelines in the event of indecision. It is neither provocative nor imaginative to say (if anything, it is by way of fitting recognition) that people who had suffered imprisonment under the Fascists would have gone back to jail or been forced into exile.
     For, wasn't it true that the official hierarchy of the Italian Communist Party itself (PCI) - though not all of it - was flanked by a clandestine network of people they could trust and who were stage-managed by the Kremlin.
     Nor can the opposite said to have been proven by Stalin's suggestion to Nenni for moderation when the latter went to pick up his (Soviet) Peace Prize. Nenni himself rightly informed De Gasperi (Alcide De Gasperi, Italy's first Christian Democrat post-War premier) and I was present as under secretary. When Nenni said he was fighting for a policy of neutrality (Italy's in terms of NATO), Stalin cut him short saying that, because of its geographical position and history, Italy could not be neutral. What he should do, instead, was fight extremism within the Treaty. Thus was born Nenni's famed slogan (though it was really Stalin's) against Atlantic extremism.
     In the consultations at the time of the crisis which beset the government in 1953, Nenni sustained that the Treaty was not an obstacle to the majority's expansion because "treaties are just pieces of paper". Later the Socialists and Nenni himself substantially adjusted this position. And in 1977, even the Communists crossed the floor in terms of the Treaty so to speak (they had already changed their opinion of European institutions when Community representative bodies stopped ostracizing them).

Awareness of the need to defend the nation from the Communist peril rapidly grew, helped along by some providential errors on the part of the counterparts

     But to go back to April 1948, the political climate had been atypical from the last six months of the year before. On May 31, De Gasperi had formed a government which, for the first time, included neither Socialists nor Communists who, to great clamor, became the Opposition. The break had been made necessary by the total divergence on Italy's international relations.
     Meanwhile at Montecitorio (the Italian lower house of Parliament), Members had pressed on with their work in a constructive spirit which had never diminished and, at the end of December 1947, they arrived at the approval of the Constitution with an overwhelming majority.
     Also ratified, though with much more difficulty, was the Peace Treaty which had been signed, moreover, by the previous coalition government.
     In a relaxed climate, Parliament continued to sit for another month after that December: to approve the Statutes for Regional Authorities requiring special treatment (Sicily, for example); to complete the electoral legislation; to draft a first bill on the press considering as obscene horrific publications and those potentially harmful to adolescents. I remember that as far as everything else was concerned, legislative functions were carried out by the Cabinet in which, alongside De Gasperi, Senator Luigi Einaudi lent prestigious, untiring service yet, by way of an exception, he had stayed on as governor of the Bank of Italy.
     The election campaign was livening up. The Communist-Socialist merger, borrowing as a model the Hero of the Two Worlds for the purpose (Giuseppe Garibaldi who unifed Italy in the mid-19th century), was countered by a group of allied democratic parties who kept their own identities and who pledged themselves totally to the democratic method (an expression De Gasperi often used). This term was not rhetorical and, since De Gasperi invited citizens to vote for one of the government parties, it did not mean that adherence to Christian Democracy was tepid either.
     Awareness of the need to defend the nation from the Communist peril rapidly grew, helped along by some providential errors on the part of the counterparts (Communists and Socialists) themselves. One of these errors was their stipulation of a pact to unsettle Europe. It had been promoted by Moscow and only came to light in a fortunate press inquiry. Realino Carboni, editor of the Roman daily Momento Sera, had handed over a copy (of the pact) to the Prime Minister with fool-proof guarantees of its authenticity.
     Luigi Longo and Eugenio Reale had represented the PCI at the "conclave" held in Poland. Any suspicion that these two had violated the secrecy had to be dispelled. So I was sent to Paris to see the French Premier Robert Schuman who saw to (the pact's) publication which we immediately reproduced and distributed in Italy. The Communists were quick to issue denials but the specter of this Cominform deeply disturbed the Italian people. But a few years later after Eugenio Reale had left the Communist Party (officially expelled from it), he not only confirmed that the pact was authentic but revealed some disturbing minutes of preparatory meetings. A feature had been Luigi Longo offering strong guarantees of arms and he even invented stories of mass strikes which never happened. The PCI was under charge for allowing itself to be put out of government and it had to justify itself. There was one quirk of fate: the harshest censors (of the PCI) had been the Yugoslavs who were soon to distance themselves from their great Kremlin comrade encouraged in this by the Front's defeat (in the Italian elections).

Following the different election result of 1953 the Prime Minister De Gasperi tried to give us an edifying lesson of life on that sad evening of July 29, by warning us never to forget that we are all useless servants

     A significant part in the democratic mobilization of 1948 had been played by the religious organizations. They ingeniously forged ad hoc links with all the forces of Catholic inspiration in addition to the structures of Catholic Action and other institutions. The following article is the direct testimony of one of the architects of that Spring campaign, Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, which had been desired and personally supported by Pius XII.
     The Church is still criticized for its participation in those circumstances in Italy. Appeals were even made to the (Church-State) Concordat of 1929 - recently introduced to the Constitution at the time. It was said that its clauses prohibiting priests from joining political parties (an odd plural for 1929 when there was only one party [Fascism]) sanctioned a sort of vow of political chastity. I remember that, in one of those really earthy kind of political meetings, I responded to the rebuke of this alleged invasion by the clergy by saying that, just as farmers were duty-bound to defend their land, the Church could not stand idly by in the face of the danger of militant atheism. For, it had already spread its tentacles in acts of violence that the Church had not witnessed for some considerable time against its pastors and faithful. Call them farmers of souls if you like, but you can't presume that they will give up without a fight.
     The Civic Committees - as the new strategic Catholic-coordinated formations were called - gave absolute priority to the fight against abstention from voting (on election day), an eventuality that was believed would lead to a Front victory. Whether this would have proven true or not (I think true), people were convinced that the Front would have been able to ensure that all its supporters would turn out to vote while, in the other camp, there were sufficiently large areas of alleged electoral indolence, others where voters could be tempted to vote out of opportunism and others still where voters were afraid. None of the Committees' election posters invited people to vote for the Christian Democrats. They appealed, rather, against absenteeism at the polls and allowing potential votes to slip through the net. It must be said, however, that one of their most effective slogans was the warning that God could see into the polling booth while Stalin could not: a clear indication as to whom not to vote for.
     Analysts are wary of quantifying the Catholic contribution to the April 18 victory in relation to the organizational potential of the Christian Democrats and their allied parties. I am not drawn to such calculations. All I know is that - in addition to the gratitude expressed to them from outside quarters - a few days after escaping the danger De Gasperi commissioned me to convey his acknowledgement to both Luigi Gedda and the then Monsignor Angelini. I also remember that, four years later (though the Civic Committees were not involved), an unwise and groundless alarm was raised for the outcome of municipal elections in Rome. This left all us politicians deeply embittered and risked sending us back down the slippery slope. When he was told of the situation in detail, Pius XII ordered that the Committee maneuver be deployed again and - though history treated him cruelly - it took its name this time from the very obedient and holy priest, Luigi Sturzo.

     I did not talk about escaping the danger blithely. The vote cast by Italians was widespread and explicit. It is a distortion of history to say that it was brought about by external factors (the American Fleet, a hangover from Yalta, mass financing and such like). It must be said here that the victory was interpreted in the most linear and right way: it meant the retention of the coalition - resisting any fundamentalist thrust - and some courageous development laws (agrarian reform, a special fund for the Italian South, and so on). That the victory was used to introduce reforms was certainly not popular with voters who, on that April 18, were seeking to block Communism but not to have resources transferred to the less affluent sectors. And it was this - among other factors - that led to the different outcome of the 1953 elections and the ungenerous, forced retirement of the Prime Minister De Gasperi who, on that sad evening of July 29, tried to give us an edifying lesson of life by warning us - New Testament in hand - never to forget that we are all useless servants.