Close Decision

For two suspense-filled days last week, tellers sweated beneath the gimlet gaze of party watchers to tally the results of Italy's national elections. In the deluge of 28 million ballots--representing a remarkable 93.7% of the electorate--rested a nation's choice between parliamentary democracy or chaos. The decision: democracy, in a perilously close race.

The winner emerged a weakened but not a discouraged champion. In 1948 Premier Alcide de Gasperi's Christian Democrats and their center allies won 62% of the vote and a big majority in the Chamber of Deputies. This time they won a narrow edge in the Senate, but, though the leading party, failed by 57,000 votes to get a clear popular majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Had those comparatively few votes swung his way, De Gasperi's hard-fought electoral-reform law would have given him a bonus of about 80 seats. As it was proportional representation gave him a 16-seat Chamber majority--enough to govern warily but not boldly.

Technically it was a victory for De Gasperi, but psychologically it was a discomfiting setback. After five years of economic gains and political stability under De Gasperi, Italians had the opportunity to vote for democrats or totalitarians of left or right. Democracy got only 49.8% of the votes.

The Left gained 1,400,000 votes and 36 more Chamber seats over 1948, now represents more than a third (35.3%) of the Italian electorate.

Disturbing statistic: of 2,700,000 youths from 21 to 25 voting for the first time, 1,200,000 voted for the totalitarian left, less than a million for the democratic center. Palmiro Togliatti's Communists and Pietro Nenni's fellow-traveling Socialists had been expected only to hold their own. In the last days of the campaign, a U.S. Senate committee hearing 4,000 miles away gave the leftists effective ammunition for crumbling one of the pillars of De Gasperi's campaign--his ability to keep U.S. aid flowing to Italy. Communist newspapers and orators recited quotes from the testimony of a brass-tongued U.S. manufacturer named Frederick C. Crawford, head of Thompson Products, Inc. (jet engine parts), who had just come back from surveying MSA operations in Italy. He recommended to the Senate: ". . . Discontinue all aid, .because aid will no longer help Italy basically." Crawford's ill-timed remarks got little play in the U.S.; they were big news in Italy--the Communists saw to that. Another formidable contributor to the left's success was its calculated good conduct during the campaign. The usual Red rule of riot and rowdiness was suspended to convince wavering Italians that Communists were really men of peace & good will.

The Right, only a minor brother in 1948, won more than 2,000,000 votes from De Gasperi's center. With their appeal for a return to the tawdry glories of Mussolini, the neo-Fascists won 29 Chamber seats. Biggest gainers were the Monarchists, led by Naples' wealthy, shipowning Mayor Achille Lauro, whose big promises and free handouts of spaghetti and clothes won 7% of the votes and 40 seats.

The line-up in the Chamber:

Christian Democrats & allies.... 303

Communists and Red Socialists...218

Monarchists..... 40

Neo-Fascists..... 29

Democracy's Forces. Disappointed, 72-year-old Alcide de Gasperi announced that he would make the most of his slim victory, and hoped to avoid French-style cabinet crises. Back in 1947, he had governed for a year with a minority; it is constitutionally harder to bring down a government in Italy than in France. Nonetheless, he would need outside help to govern. De Gasperi's moderate Socialist allies urged him to flirt with the Nenni Red Socialists, but De Gasperi is not the man to forget that Pietro Nenni was the only non-Communist allowed to stand guard at the bier of Joseph Stalin. On the right, Lauro's Monarchists hoped to be invited to join a new De Gasperi cabinet, but for them the Premier saved his angrier words: "Those irresponsible gentlemen who, in wanting to save monarchy, did not hesitate to endanger the country ... the ruling classes of southern Italy, heirs to centuries-old tradition of neglect and sloth ... are responsible for the fact that 70 more leftists will be seated in the new Parliament."

In the next few years, democracy will be sitting on a knife-edge in Italy. In parliamentary pinches, De Gasperi will have to count on grudging votes of individual Monarchists to carry him through.

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