De Gasperi's Fall

It was Rome's hottest day of the summer, and a dismal day for Premier Alcide de Gasperi. The Monarchists and neo-Fascists stuck stonily to their decision to throw all their votes against him. His long-time allies of the center, the Liberals, Social Democrats and Republicans, would not give him even one of their 38 votes. The Red Socialists of Pietro Nenni and their friends the Communists sat in the Chamber of Deputies behind smug smiles of triumph. "Italy." said owlish Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti placidly, "will certainly and inevitably pass through the Communist experience in the end."

"I Prefer Death." Fatigued and discouraged from two weeks of trying to patch together a parliamentary majority, 72-year-old Premier de Gasperi rose to his feet for one last appeal. Democracy could not compromise with the Red left or the black right and survive, he insisted, speaking calmly but with a dry, bitter awareness of what was to come. The rightists could not be trusted, he said. As for the Communists and the Red Socialists: "We cannot entrust the country to either Communism or a coalition which would fall under the Cominform and invariably lead to forced labor, concentration camps and slavery. Rome would thus share the fate of Moscow and Prague . . . I am not prepared to be either an Italian Kerensky or a Von Papen. To this I would prefer political or physical death."

But only the deputies of his Christian Democratic Party seemed even to listen to the Premier's plea. Togliatti buried his nose in a picture magazine. The opposition demanded the vote. By a margin of 19 votes—282 to 263, with 37 center deputies abstaining—the Chamber rejected Alcide de Gasperi's proposed cabinet and propelled Italy into her worst political crisis since the war. Only once before in 31 years had an Italian Parliament forced a Premier to resign. His name was Luigi Facta, and the man who soon succeeded him was Benito Mussolini.

A sad-faced De Gasperi quickly asked the Chamber to suspend, then drove 40 miles to the summer home of President Luigi Einaudi to report his defeat and submit his resignation.

It was a blow to democracy in Italy, and a blow to the Western alliance. Italy had, temporarily at least, rejected the leader who for eight years had fought steadfastly for parliamentary democracy while surrounded by parliamentarians dedicated to the destruction of democracy. The West had, at a crucial moment, lost its staunch apostle of NATO, EDC and European unification. "Italy may be entering upon a new period of political disturbance and uncertainty," mourned the London Times. "Signor de Gasperi's defeat is a shock to the complacency about the political stability of the Western world."