ITALY: A Word of Warning

Italy was in the midst of a government crisis again, created by the downfall of wispy, white-haired Premier Antonio Segni. But what seemed only an annual event (Premiers have averaged ten months in office since Italy's late great Alcide de Gasperi was defeated in 1953) became something more last week. Courteous, conservative Cesare Merzagora, 61, longtime president of Italy's Senate, dramatically posed a fundamental question: How healthy is Italy's 15-year-old postwar democracy?

Merzagora's political patience was exhausted by the extralegal manner in which Segni's minority Christian Democratic government tiptoed out of office. Fortnight ago, outraged by President Giovanni Gronchi's humiliating visit to Moscow (TIME, Feb. 22) and convinced that the Christian Democrats were slipping toward an "unclear and unclean agreement" with Italy's big, Red-tainted Socialist Party, Italy's free-enterprising Liberals announced that their 18 Deputies would no longer support Segni. Since this meant that his government could survive only by accepting Fascist support, Segni resigned without even asking for a vote of confidence.

Next day in the Senate, Merzagora coldly pointed out that this was the third Italian government in a row that had been destroyed without any consultation with Parliament. If Italy's party bosses continued to make and unmake governments in cozy backroom deals, said Merzagora, "we might as well turn Parliament into a restricted executive committee to save time and money."

Then, though he himself is a distinguished Milanese businessman, Merzagora also threw in a blunt word of warning about the malign influence exercised on Italy's government by the nation's great capitalists and its huge government corporations, which have steadily expanded since Fascist days. Said he: "An atmosphere of corruption weighs on Italian political life, polluted by speculation and unlawful financial activities . . . If Italy does not soon rediscover the joys of political honesty, very sad prospects lie before us."

Ordinary Italians, painfully aware that their politicians are too absorbed in influence peddling and office seeking to devote much attention to the nation's grave social and economic problems, mostly applauded Merzagora. But Italy's political bosses, leftists and rightists alike, chorused righteously that Merzagora was "discrediting democratic institutions." After the secretary of the Christian Democratic Party complained that the corruption charge might even be "twisted" to apply to Christian Democrats, Merzagora resigned as Senate president. After that, President Gronchi and the party bosses settled down to the agreeable political dickering that, in time, will presumably produce another carefully weighted, immobilized compromise government very like Segni's.