ITALY: Moving to the Left

• Share

In the Hall of Mirrors of Rome's block-long Quirinale Palace. Italy's 70-year-old President Giovanni Gronchi swore in his good friend Amintore Fanfani, 50, as Premier, along with a Cabinet of 19. Not since Italy became a Republic after World War II had an Italian government leaned so far to the left.

The new government could be expected to be as pro-West as before, but its makeup showed Fanfani's determination to break with Italy's postwar middle-of-the-road pattern. To his only ally in the coalition government, Giuseppe Saragat's anti-Communist Socialists, Fanfani gave four crucial posts in social experiment—the Ministries of Finance, Labor, State Participation and Communications. For the first time since the war, a trade unionist was included in the Cabinet: Giulio Pastore, the head of the anti-Communist labor federation, CISL, became Minister for Economic Development of Southern Italy and Depressed Areas. Fanfani dropped Giuseppe Pella, a leader of the Christian Democrats' right wing, as Foreign Minister and took the post himself.

With a majority of only one or two votes for his government in the Chamber of Deputies, Fanfani hedged his gamble by handing important Ministries of the Budget, Treasury and Interior to more conservative members of the Christian Democratic Party. Some of his critics grudgingly conceded that despite its leftward lean, Fanfani's Cabinet struck a "perfect balance." Absent from the government coalition were the Liberals, Italy's nearest equivalent to a free-enterprise party. Sighed Liberal Leader Giuseppe Malagodi: "Every nation in Europe seems to have tried the socialist adventure. Now it is Italy's turn."

No Brief for Capitalism. Fanfani's idea of socialist adventuring stems from his long espousal of Italian left-wing Catholicism. Ever since his first days as professor of economics at Milan's Catholic University, Fanfani has argued the moral responsibility of both church and state to look after the needs of the people, and has had little brief for capitalism—at least the type of capitalism that Italy has long known. Said Fanfani in Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, one of the 16 books he has written: "Capitalism requires such a dread of loss, such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood, such a certainty that a man's neighbor is merely a customer to be gained or a rival to be overthrown, and all these are inconceivable in the Catholic conception . . . There is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life."

Fanfani is the youngest Italian Premier to take office since Mussolini in 1922. A teen-ager when Fascism began, he saw the corporate state as the ideal, and in what he calls a "temporary aberration" turned to Fascism. "Some day," he once wrote, "the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles."