Italy: Between Left & Right

Fifteen months ago, when Italian Premier Amintore Fanfani marched his moderate Christian Democratic Party through the apertura a sinistra (opening to the left) into a parliamentary partnership with the left-wing Socialists, he acknowledged the deal as a dangerous gamble. "We shall certainly have some sleepless nights," he said. By now, Fanfani must be a hopeless insomniac.

Last week nearly 33 million Italians went to the polls for national elections and rewarded their experimenting Premier with a jolting setback that cost his party 730,000 votes and may well cost him his job. The apertura might survive, but its future—like Fanfani's—would be riskier than ever. Ashen-faced, the pint-size (5 ft. 1 in.) Premier faced reporters in the Chigi Palace on election night with uncommon shock. "The Christian Democrats,'' he declared, "have been declared as the relative majority party, even if by a narrower margin than before. And now to bed."

Papal Pal. To bed indeed. Fanfani already had news of the massive gains of Palmiro Togliatti's Communists, who improved their position as the country's second largest party (after the Christian Democrats), won 25% of the entire nation's votes, and 26 new seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The Reds now hold a total of 166 of the Chamber's 630 places, compared with the Christian Democrats' 260.

Under the shrewd leadership of aging (70) Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, the Reds have always taken care to balance their ideology against the fact that Italy is a Catholic nation. At one time they backed the monarchy; nowadays they even favor the capitalist Common Market. As a nation, Italy is less than a century old; first under the monarchy, then through the long night of Fascism, the country has had little time to accustom itself to democracy. Thus, to many Italians, Communism—or at least their brand of it—does not appear the fearful specter that it does in many other lands.

In part, the Communist showing was due to Red defections from Pietro Nenni's sharply divided Socialists, the left-wing crowd that had thrown its lot with Fanfani. And in part it was due to Pope John XXIII, who had given a modicum of approval to the far left with his Pacem in Terris encyclical, and with his warm welcome to the Vatican last March for Nikita Khrushchev's visiting son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei.

New Low. From the right, apertura's chief challenge was among the free-enterprising Liberals, who more than doubled their previous vote of 1,000,000; this was a spectacular gain, even if it amounted to only 7% of the total turnout. Most of the credit went to tireless Liberal Campaigner Giovanni Malagodi, 58, a banker turned politician, who hit out hard at Fanfani's schemes for more government planning and higher taxes.