Back from the Brink

As a chill breeze drove dark clouds overhead, some 500 striking Sicilian farm laborers worked at strengthening a rock barrier blocking Route 115, leading north from Avola along the coast to Syracuse. Up rumbled a nine-truck police convoy, and 90 cops descended. Deliberately, officers donned their tricolor sashes (required as a preliminary to making arrests) and their men doffed berets for steel helmets. The strikers, taking these preparations as a provocation, began pelting the police with stones; the cops, deploying into a nearby field, replied with tear gas. In the ensuing melee, one group of policemen, fearing that they were about to be overrun, opened fire. When the fusillade stopped, one striker lay dead and another dying. Five more were wounded.

That incident at Avola was the opening episode in an outbreak of Italian violence that for a time seemed to presage nationwide chaos on the scale of the French pandemonium of last May. Leftists plastered walls all over the country with signs shrieking "Down with the Assassins of the Workers," and headlines in the leftist Roman newspaper Paese Sera screamed MASSACRE! Students and workers across the nation joined in temporary alliance to stage a series of violent protest strikes and demonstrations. There were, of course, causes beyond the deaths at Avola. Students, too often locked into archconservative curriculums, wanted a general broadening of their studies as well as more participation in academic decisions. Workers sought far-ranging improvements in their job conditions, which have not kept pace with Italy's rapid economic transformation. From the prosperous north to the impoverished south, universities and schools were seized, cars burned and windows smashed.

Compleat Politician. As suddenly as it had erupted, the violence faded away. Italy's Communist Party, which at first had seized on Avola as a pretext for mass demonstrations, now passed word to its members to stay off the streets. As the largest Communist Party in the West, the Italian Reds are more interested in ballots than barricades. The party leadership realized that stirring trouble in Italy during the Christmas season is an excellent way to lose popularity. The more radical Maoists and anarchists carried on for a while, but the budding worker-student alliance fell apart, largely because of mutual mistrust. Above all, the protesters lacked a target. Italy was still without an effective government, as it had been since Aldo Moro quit the Premier's job in June.

Largely unruffled by the demonstrations, the country's politicians kept plodding ahead with plans for a new government. Premier-designate Mariano Rumor, a portly, 53-year-old bachelor, patiently read through a stack of policy recommendations and painstakingly weighed the distribution of Cabinet posts among his fellow Christian Democratic Party politicians and members of other parties in the ranks of the proposed center-left coalition.