Out in the Cold
'Eisenhower, the course of the next few weeks. President
E Dr. Adenauer and M. Couve de Murville will all have visited Rome, and the Italian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister will have both visited London. Italy can hardly com- plain of being left out in the cold; she may not really loom large in the Western alliance. but she is being treated as though she does, which amounts in a way to the same thing. What's more. it may all add to such Italian prestige as Presi- dent Gronchi takes to Moscow with him next month. The .Allied governments in power—Mr. Macmillan's, President Eisenhower's and General de Gaulle's—will hardly be disappointed if al their buttering-up of Italian egos, settles the Christian Democrats more firmly in the saddle of government. The party conference in Florence a couple of weeks ago showed the Christian Democrats to be as deeply divided as ever, and their standing suffered severely during the sum- mer in the elections in semi-autonomous Sicily and Val d'Aosta.' But flattery from like-minded parties in power in France, Britain and the United
States may prove insufficient to reconcile the in- creasingly irreconcilable factions that make up Italian Christian Democracy. So far, these factions have somehow worked together—grumbling, re- sentful and sometimes mutually treacherous— largely because of the need to present a united Catholic front against Communism. Now that their allies, however much they may flatter Italian leaders, are also flattering Communism abroad, Communism at home isn't the bogey is used to be. The Val d'Aostans and the Sicilians didn't seem to think so. anyway
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