While Rome Burns
Our Rome Correspondent writes: It will be a tragedy for Italy and the Western world if Pella falls on the marginal problem of Trieste. For Trieste is the least substantial of the problems that this business-like states- man has inherited from the visionary De Gasperi. Pella took over two months ago when no one else could see how a centre government could exist in this parliament and when no one in the Centre dared admit the weight of the heritage : a menacing labour situation, with strongly anti-Communist trade . unions compelled to combine with the powerful Communist Labour Federation in its demands on the still conscience-less industrialists; the end of Marshall Aid revealing the full peril of the foreign trade gap; a major slump in the big textile industry and a sharp upset in the steel industry (a result of the birth of the Coal and Steel Community); sudden uneasiness about a European Defence Community dominated by a well-gunned Germany buttered up by Washington; and, incidentally, the emotional Trieste problem.
The De Gasperi regime ended with the Communists and their Nenni Socialist allies winning ten million Votes. Failure to solve any one of these problems would no doubt win them more in new elections. Pella has unexpectedly emerged as the one man in Italy who seems likely to be able to tackle these difficulties and keep this young democracy going. He has also shown every sign of being willing to tackle them. One can assume that, if a workable compromise on Trieste exists, then Pella will compromise. The policy of his pre- decessors forced him to accept the impulsive Allied decision of October 8 to pull out of Zone A and chuck it to Italy. His political ability turned it to the temporary advantage of his Government, earning him dangerously easy applause from the right wing parties. His skill has been betrayed by the clumsy Allied miscalculation of Belgrade's reaction.
If Pella is forced into resignation, the President of the Republic will probably ask him to form another government, but this time with a foreign minister who has had no part of Italy's Atlantic Pact past. If he accepts the charge—which seems unlikely—he would have to choose as foreign minister either a member of the passionately nationalist Monarchist Party or Pietro Nenni, who has carefully detached his Socialist Party from the Communists on each foreign policy issue during the past eight months. But if Pella refuses to form the new government, Nenni is the next most likely choice. Last year Nenni won the Stalin Peace Prize.
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