ITALY: The Headless Wonder

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Into Rome's White House, the Quirinal palace, last week slipped a familiar visitor. Seven weeks after the downfall of Antonio Segni's center-right government and one week after the failure of Fernando Tambroni to form a rightist government nakedly dependent on Italy's neo-Fascists for a parliamentary majority, tough little Amintore Fanfani, 52, was asked to paste together another Christian-Democratic coalition.

To the Christian Democrats' own 272 votes, Fanfani planned to add the 17 controlled by Social Democrat Leader Giuseppe Saragat, six Republican seats and three independent ones, for a bare one-vote majority. Since so slim a margin would offer his government no protection against secret desertions by members of his own party in parliamentary voting, Fanfani planned to rely on Pietro Nenni's Socialists to agree at least to abstain from voting against a Fanfani government. While some Italians saw this as the long-discussed "opening to the left," which would take the Christian Democrats down the road to more statism, Social-Democrat Leader Saragat himself argued otherwise. Confronted with a clear choice of supporting a nonCommunist, pro-Western Socialist position, the elusive Nenni would either have to go along, or stand revealed as a hopeless lackey of Moscow.

Though newspapers front-paged Italy's "worst crisis" since World War II, the crisis seemed to concern only the politicians. Italy was booming. Production was up 16% from last year, and wages were running 6.4% ahead. Despite the recurrent crises, Italy has an underlying stability. Though the Christian Democrats had made a prolonged spectacle of their inability to achieve a stable parliamentary majority, their opposition of the far left, the Communists and Nenni's Socialists, cannot achieve any kind of majority at all. Thus each government is and must be Christian Democratic, differing only slightly in detail and direction.