Italian Strikes
Our Rome Correspondent writes: Signor Pella has failed in his attempt to call a truce to Party politics so that some necessary governing could be done in Italy. The Communists have been fostering an explosive labour situation for. over a year. They might not have detonated it for another few months, but Signor Pella, having linked himself with the Right-wing elements on the Trieste question, discovered, too late, that the situation had got out of hand. So the Communists chose this moment to launch their labour attack on the government as well as the indus- trialists. The Prime Minister demonstrated his lurch to the Right by his vigorous reaction to the opening phase of the offensive. He threatened that anyone who struck on Friday in the biggest strike of State employees ever organised in Italy, would lose a day's pay, and forfeit all .special allowances and any chance of promotion. For ill-paid Roman bureaucrats the risk was too great and the strike was unsuccessful as a syndicalist demonstration against the Government. But it succeeded perfectly in revealing the aimlessness of the Christian Democrat party, the main and reluctant prop of the Pella Government. On the eve of the civil servants' strike the Christian Democrat executive, headed by the ex-Prime Minister Signor c16 Gasperi, clearly indicated in a statement that half its sympathies were with the strikers. More. than half the Christian Democrat deputies in Parliament are utterly hostile to the industrialists against whom Tuesday's strike was aimed. But the expressions of sympathy have not saved the Christian Democrat labour leaders from having to limp along behind the striding Communists, reluctantly accompanying them in their attack on the Government. A Government leaning on the Right cannot intervene against the industrialists. And the paralysis of the Christian Democrat party as a whole has made them helpless spectators of the direct conflict between Communists and industrialists which provides the only dynamism in the Italian political situation. This is a situation so dangerous that it almost justifies the five years of imniabilismo of the de Gasperi Government.
Previous page
