Who should govern Italy?
Peter Nichols
Mexico City I had temporarily left Rome and heard the first reports of the likely fall of the Italian government by radio at a mission-station administered by Italian priests near Iringa in Tanzania. I read of its resignation on the island of Cozumel off the Mexican coast. I was at Merida on the way back to Mexico City when I heard that Ugo La Malfa had been asked to form a government.
Whatever the outcome, La Malfa has the distinction of becoming if not the first prime minister outside the Catholic ranks since the Immediate post-war years at least the first Official, non-Christian Democrat aspirant to the post. Oddly, at this moment when Italy's democracy is urgently in need of a fresh stimulus, the country is turning once again to the older generation. President Pertini was over eighty when chosen to replace the disgraced Giovanni Leone last Year. La Malfa was himself a candidate for that post, too, and now has some consolation for his disappointment, particularly as his Republican Party is tiny by comparison with Christian Democrat or Communist strength. The traditional concept of classical democracy, of the type in which La Malfa and Pertini believe, may now in fact, have reached the stage of being an old man's creed: or it may simply be that only the men with a half a century or so of political life behind them know where they stand on basic questions. Both Pertini and La Malfa saw the rise of Fascism and did all they Could to oppose it. In La Malfa's case, his experiences — which include the deputy Prime ministership and the treasury — convinced him of the need of a place for the left In government as a means of achieving social reforms and a full place for Italy in the European Community. For years his slogan was a call for 'scaling the Alps' and for socialist collaboration in government. L. ately he has openly granted democratic Intentions to the communists and readily expresses his personal respect for Enrico Berlinguer, the communist leader. There is sufficient common ground for La Malfa to be able to rationalise this respect. He has also had his disappointments. I remember some twenty years ago sitting in .once famous café opposite the prime minister's offices on Piazza Colonna, having a drink with Ugo La Malfa at the inauguration of what was to be the period of cientre-left rule in Italy. This step brought tNne socialists, under the leadership of Pietro „ennt, into a governmental alliance .with :ine Christian Democrats — a striking "evelopment given that the Party remained Marxist while the Christian Democrats were recognised as the Catholic Party. La Malfa was overjoyed. He had been one of the principal supporters of the alliance. He looked up through his heavily framed glasses and said: We shall now see a decade of great Moro-Nenni administrations which will carry out the reforms we need.' Moro is now dead, the victim of terrorists, and Nenni only has single figures separating him from his hundredth birthday. And between them they did not carry out the promised reforms, nor did they manage to achieve the centre-left's second aim, which was the isolation and weakening of the communists.
Europe, too, failed to respond to La Malfa's activism. He sometimes seems pursued by a positive fear of Italy's Mediterranean features, as if the sea sits on a society aiming to be industrial and 'northern' like the monkey on the back of the abbess. As a Sicilian, he has first-hand knowledge of what the Mediterranean means and, to him, it is wrong for Italy, wrong for any democratic, modern, advanced future. In addition, he holds De Gaulle responsible for practically everything that has gone wrong in Western Europe since the war. I was talking to La Malfa on the day De Gaulle first vetoed British entry. He put forward an urgent plea for the immediate negotiation of an agreement between Britain and Italy to incorporate all that the two countries had decided about British ties with Europe, in order to encourage other countries favourable to our entry to do the same.
La Malfa is in no way a revolutionary. He can be difficult, impulsive, by turn overoptimistic and over-pessimistic. He is generally remembered for his long list of warnings over the years, usually against the perilously growing powers of the unions and the growth of public expenditure. He was able to co-operate with some Christian Democrats but was quite free in his attacks on the members of the governing Party whom he did not like. One was the outgoing prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. He remarked once that Moro thought in terms of centuries and Andreotti never looked beyond the evening of the same day. He came nearer the mark in identifying Italy's problems with a typical sally against the Christian Democrats, in which he described them as failing to understand capitalism because they were still in a 'pre-capitalist stage'. Presumably he was thinking here of the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It is clear that capitalism does not need democracy but so far the classical forms of democracy have always depended on capitalist economics.
In the economic sense Italy is a hybrid. There has been some nationalisation and a great deal of Italian industry is controlled directly or indirectly by the,state. This fact prompted the communists to say that they would seek no fresh nationalisation if they came to power, a statement which might also be taken as meaning that they accepted a degree of capitalism as a part of their move towards acceptance as democrats. La Malfa has acCepted Berlinguer's claims to democratic seriousness more on political grounds. He feels that Berlinguer has been explicit enough in telling the Russians that democracy is an essential part of Italian communism: he also accepts that the country is in so bad a condition that a communist contribution is essential to its revival. He was bitter when the Americans produced their anti-communist statement a year ago; he not only disagreed with it but he thought that he had been successful in persuading the Rome embassy against any such move by the State Department.
No one, however, would expect La Malfa to offer Cabinet seats to the communists, and for them there is credit to be gained among their own supporters by having been responsible for bringing down the last government and thus opening the way to the first non-Christian Democrat candidate to the prime ministership. The issue here is, again, much deeper than it looks; Italians talk about democracy as freely as the rest of us. More so probably than most: the talk is an indication of the uncertainties surrounding the term. La Malfa's preference would be for the old fashioned type of democracy — in which one side, or grouping of parties, is in power and the other is out. But he has come round to the idea that as many as possible should be in government, or in agreement with the governing parties. The question is whether his outlook is a result of the actual situation in Italy or whether he, too, has breathed the heavy
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