Italian Election Circus
By JENNY NICHOLSON Rome.
TALY'S second general elections since the Mussolini- Hitler war, took place last Sunday and Monday in an atmosphere of religious solemnity. The result has been that although De Gasperi's Christian Democratic Party and his Republican, Liberal and Social Democrat allies have won a majority of 13 in the Senate, they lost (by 57,000 votes) the absolute majority they needed to profit by the new electoral law in the Chamber of Deputies. But there are 1,300,000 voting papers challenged—mainly by the Communists—and the special Commission which has been set up to investigate them will report on their validity when the new Chamber meets for the first time on June 25th. This is likely to result in, scenes even more violent than those which raged in the Chamber and the Senate during the passage of the new Electoral Law. And if the result turns out to be unhealthy, it was at least a healthy sign that the poll was the highest ever recorded under Western democracy. The election campaign during the past six weeks had all the nuisance-value of a thousand circuses, all the garish disfiguring posters, but none of the novelty. Eight thousand candidates of the fourteen parties for the 590 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the 237 in the Senate had spent the biggest campaign funds ever heard of in Italy. But not one of them announced a specific programme. The ringmasters cracked their whips without conviction, performing parrots repeated old party lines and the elephants cynically remembered having heard it all before. In Naples the clowning of the Monarchist leader, Commandante Achille Lauro, raised laughs and votes with his political tumbling which included the buying of some first-class footballers to give Naples a winning team and the distribution of free packets of spaghetti labelled " From your King." The seemingly meaningless Monarchist slogan: ' Not restoration but recall ' disguised the Monarchist intention as a party quixotically to take part in a Republican government as soon as they were able. The neo-fascists, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), engaged the sympathies of large numbers of the crowd by show- ing off like a discredited but still game old dog who had learned one or two feeble new tricks. They might have been the only ones to have produced a specific programme—the " Charter of Verona " (Mussolini's document of national socialism plus), but they were paralysed by an unruly division in their ranks between the young revolutionaries—heirs of Mussolini's social republic of Salo who support the charter, and those who are known as the " nostalgics "—former office holders, mainly from the South, who favour the more benevolent aspects of fascism which Italy wore until her intervention in the Spanish Civil War.
Balloons went up, fireworks went off, aeroplanes dropped leaflets, and the crowds trudged to the Piazzas in what seemed like a mood of impenetrable torpor to watch their candidates perform. The Communist supporters yelled obediently, while their leaders estimated proudly that after the millions of American dollars which had been poured into the country to defeat them, and after seven years of Western democracy they would still get a twenty-five per cent. vote, thus maintaining their position as the biggest Communist party in Europe. Nenni, head of the Socialists, never did anything more adventurous than unhitching his waggon from the Cdmmunist star, and proclaiming " the Socialist alternative " which meant that he was prepared to go into a coalition with De Gasperi if the centre party alliance (De Gasperi's Christian Democrats, Liberals, Republicans, and Social Democrats) didn't get their fifty per cent. plus. More than six months ago the four. parties of the centre had calculated that they would win just over fifty per cent. of the votes in the elections for the Chamber. They estimated that the Communists and their Nenni Socialist allies would win thirty-five per cent. and that the extreme Right Wing (Neo- Fascists and Monarchists) would get the remaining fifteen per cent. De Gasperi, reasoning that such a result would make Italy practically ungovernable (for the Left and Right Wings would not hesitate to combine against the Government) forced through Parliament a law which gives a bonus of two-thirds of the seats in the Chamber to the group of parties which wins more than fifty per cent. of the votes. The ferocious Left Wing . opposition to this law was unavailing in the Chamber. But it reduced the Senate to such pandemonium that the Govern- ment decided that its prestige could only be re-established by re-election, so that the Italians have voted for both an upper as well as a lower house. The centre parties, who could not hope to win their fifty per cent. plus unless the poll was high, prayed for fine election days. They were afraid that if the weather was bad their supporters, who are neither so well disciplined as the Left nor so full of emotional bravado as the Right, might be discouraged from- voting. But the torpor of the crowds which politicians and observers had diagnosed as apathy, proved to be sophistication.
In Old Testament weather, ninety-three per cent. of the population struggled forth to vote. Under menacing skies, they phut-phutted to the polls on their motor-scooters. Farmers came with their families in rickety carts, prepared for a long wait by bringing their midday polenta in bowls. Workmen converged on the booths with sacking round their shoulders against the hot heavy rain, their hats folded out of their favourite newspapers sogging on their heads. The sick were brought on stretchers and voted secretly behind a 'sheet which was held in front, of them. People who had no economic prot• lems and who could have persuaded themselves that it didn't matter, drove to the polls through lightning forking earthward. Country people came in sheaves of three and four, crowded under the huge green family umbrella along the straight wet roads of the Po valley. The poverty-harried little people of Sardinia struggled to the polls through a freak tempest. A band of monks waded down a torrential river-bed from their distant monastery. Nuns hitch-hiked with difficulty, for in Italy it's unlucky to give a lift to a person in black. Sony • times the sullen Scirocco gained gale force, tearing the tiles off roofs, flattening the matured crops, blowing voters off their bicycles and dislocating communications. And still the people showed they were taking their elections seriously. As in the days of Herod, the roads were choked with travellers going to their place of registration, for there is no postal vote in Italy. Toscanini flew 4,000 miles to vote in Milan.
It was an eloquent reproof to the politicians from a people who should have been given something better than stale and expensive circuses. It had not been enough for the Christian Democrats and their allies to have adopted the slogan " Let facts speak for themselves," which meant that they intended going on doing what they have been doing over the past seven years, only perhaps more so. Although De Gasperi has ruled the country during a difficult period of reconstruction, his record has shown him to be almost a stranger to his nation in his attachment to democracy, in his patience with his own party bosses, with his religious superiors and with the millions of Italians who do not understand democracy. His supporters had hoped to hear him promise a programme for the closing of the " lire-gap "- the gaping void between the very rich and the very poor in Italy—for the reducing of the two million unemployed, for the introduction of fair taxation. But they were disappointed. All parties were on the defensive (except perhaps the MSI and the Monarchists, who are so young that they hadn't much to lose). Because Italian nationalism is touchy and explosive, no candidate dared admit that he and his fellows were mere assistants and no ringmasters in the international arena.
It may have been the mysterious weather which gave the biblical quality to the election days—it may have had a sober ing effect on normally high-spirited Italians. But in the polling stations it felt more than that. They had all the eerie hush of holy places where some rite was being performed. Approach ing them one involuntarily dropped one's voice. Outside ther were soldiers in summer khaki uniforms with slung rifles alert, serious, kindly. On the walls for all to read were huge copies of the Penal Code governing elections, and the poster showing all the fourteen parties, their candidates and their symbols. Inside, the trestle table with the two voting boxes—one for the Chamber, one for the Senate—was like an altar. The President in his best Sunday suit and the Secretary and scrutators were like a priest and his servers. Voters were given their two papers—yellow for the Chamber, pale blue for the Senate—and they went into the booths to make their crosses as if they were entering a confessional. This atmosphere prevailed, according to observers, all over the country—from the ramshackle school-rooms of the south to the offices with glass doors in the industrialised northern towns, from the municipal chambers on the Capitol Hill in Rome to the converted farmstead in the Campagna where the not wet weather had driven the flies in so that they were like black marmalade on the walls, plagueing the people involved in the voting, pursued even to the gloomy booths by screeching swallows. And in this atmosphere of a people taking their civiotesponsibilities seriously, the Communists and Catholics accusing each other of cheating struck a shrill and irreverent chord. The Communists had been preparing to declare the whole vote illegal if the centre parties got their 50 per cent. plus. They have charged dozens of Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops with violation of the penal code provisions against undue pressup on the electors. The Bishops (the regional organism of Catholic . Action—masters of 18,000 Civic Committees run on the Communist cell system and the back- bone of the Christian Democrat party's organisation in Italy) had been outspoken. What the Vatican city newspaper, Osservatore Romano, implied, they announced clearly from their pulpits : " It is the religious duty of every Catholic to vote—and to vote Demo-Christian."
But when election days dawned everyone was studiously correct. No propaganda was allowed within 200 metres of the polling stations, so priests with Churches within the limits were careful to keep their sermons general. Communists, instructed by their cells to report any irregularities at the polls, enthusiastically produced many which were published in Unita but when carefully investigated proved, though in each case with a basis of truth, to have been exaggerated into nonsense. The Catholics in Quotidiano were equally unreliable in their reports of irregularities. Watching the regular rhythm of the voting—the checking and cross-checking of lists with identity cards—it was impossible to see how anyone could cheat. But Communists in Sicily sprayed every nun and priest with paint as they went into the polling station lust to be sure they couldn't vote twice.
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