Italy to the polls—yet again

Press, 24 June 1983, Page 14

Italy to the polls—yet again

PATRICK WORSNIP,

of Reuters, in Rome

Without whistle-stop tours, without walkabouts, and without babykissing, Italy is in the middle of an election campaign; elections are one time when the Italians’ flair for the theatrical seems to desert them. Speeches are plentiful, but they are arid stuff, usually delivered in assembly rooms to the party faithful or printed in close type in party newspapers. Most Italians will dutifully re-

port to the polling stations on June 26 and 27, but it is hard to find one who believes that any big change is possible. Italy has had 43 administrations since the end of World War II but cannot really claim to have had a change of government. Every Cabinet has been dominated by the Christian Democratic Party, either ruling alone or in coalition with smaller parties. The outgoing Prime Minister, Amintore Fanfani, has headed five administrations, and may head the next. He was Prime Minister for the first time in 1954, when his administration lasted 12 days. The longest-lived Government was headed by the late Aldo Moro and lasted 833 days from February, 1966, to June, 1968. Mr Moro

was Prime Minister five times before he was assassinated in 1978 by urban guerrillas of the Red Brigade. An Italian Government official, defending the self-repeating nature of the system, said this was because it was controlled by a series of “democratic checks.” “Administrative changes are more important than government changes,” he said. The “democratic checks” are provided by the strict system of proportional representation, which rules out the kind of landslide victory won by the British Conservative Party under Britain’s “winner-takes-all” arrangement. The way that the Tories took a commanding hold of the British Parliament while polling less than half of the vote seems to have aroused pangs of envy in some Italian politicians. The senate president, Vittorino Colombo, a Christian Democrat, said that the British had opted for stability, which Italy needed as well. He criticised “the excessive pluralism of our electoral system which leads to fragmentation.” In post-war Italy, the Christian Democrats have tended to poll rather more than a third of the

vote, the Communists a few points less, with the rest split among about five other parties, of which the Socialists took around 10 per cent last time in 1979.

This inevitably leads to Christian Democrat-led coalitions or political arrangements, which collapse when the parties fall out over policies or the allocation of jobs.

The one occasion in recent years when the Italian political scene flared briefly into life was at the 1976 election when it looked as though the Communists might top the Christian Democrats. In the event, they fell two points short, and have declined steadily since. With Parliamentary seats depending on long-term political trends rather than individual effort, Italian politicians see little need for the,vote catching antics that their counterparts in some other countries employ at election time, although one woman candidate in this election has held her election meetings bare-breasted. The Christian Democrats, far from campaigning on their record in office, have published posters promising to get Italy out of its crisis — a crisis for which, after four decades in power, they can hardly blame any other party. Many Italians feel that the poli-

ticians of all parties, despite their well-publicisea quarrels, form a class of their own detached from the nation at large, except in so far as they can exploit it for their own profit. Italy, for centuries a patchwork of competing city states and spheres of influence, was unified in the 1860 s, and many regions still feel thaty have little in common with Rome.

Bureaucracy lays its dead hand everywhere, social services creak, and large sums of money allocated to develop the more backward areas seem to end up in the hands of organised crime. Yet, for all the loud scorn for politicians heard in bars and restaurants, Italians remain extremely conservative in their voting habits. Only the Christian Democrats, who roughly correspond to Conservative parties in other countries, and the Communists, who have cornered most of the Leftwing vote, have developed a mass following. No credible third force has emerged, although the Socialists forced this election by leaving the last ruling coalition in the apparent hope of becoming such a force by increasing their vote. The Christian Democrats have

the tacit backing of the powerful Roman Catholic Church, while the Communists operate their traditional party discipline.

The Communist Party, though one of the world’s most independent of Moscow, has always been excluded from power by the other parties who fear the reaction of Italy’s European allies and the United States if it were brought into a Government.

The electorate, by its voting pattern, seems to share this concern. The Communists themselves have studied carefully the lessons of Chile, where the election of a Marxist Government led to a Right-wing military takeover in 1973.

Another reason for the consistency of Italian voting, sociologists say, is the age-old system of political patronage, especially in the old-fashioned south of the country.

Under this practice people expect to benefit one way or another from voting for a particular local personality or his party. Although the ballot is secret, nothing will convince many Italians that the powerful do not have some means of finding out which way their clients have voted.