Danger on the Left

Expressionlessly, the handsome man with the greying blond hair and pale blue eyes read his own name aloud from ballot after ballot: "Gronchi . . . Gronchi . . . Gronchi . . ." At the 422nd time, the assembled Deputies and Senators of Italy's Parliament broke into applause, and Giovanni Gronchi, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, stopped reading and rose to acknowledge the cheers. He had just been elected President of the Republic of Italy.

Gronchi (pronounced gronc-key) is a Christian Democrat. But the loudest cheers came from the Communists and their fellow-traveling allies, Pietro Nenni's Socialists. Mario Scelba. the Christian Democratic Premier, stood in glum silence. He and Party Secretary Amintore Fanfani had done everything in their power to prevent the election of their fellow Christian Democrat. Gronchi's victory was a humiliating defeat for Scelba's shaky four-party coalition of the center; it was an open defiance of Fanfani's personal leadership of the big Christian Democratic Party, which has firmly guided Italy into the anti-Communist front since the war.

The Voice of Discipline. The President of the Republic, who lives in the palace of the kings, is chiefly charged with ceremonial entertaining, signing bills, opening trade fairs. But he has one decisive function: he designates the Premier. In the faction-ridden Christian Democratic Party, Gronchi is the leader of a group which advocates the "opening to the left." He is also his party's outstanding symbol of a leftist neutralist tendency. With Scelba's government riven by disputes, the danger is that Gronchi would, sooner or later, pick a Premier who would bring the Nenni Socialists and their Communist-minded policies into the government.

For weeks before the presidential election, Fanfani and Scelba had been conferring with the three minor parties of the coalition to decide who should succeed Luigi Einaudi, a Liberal, as President. Einaudi is widely respected, but he is 81, and many disliked setting a precedent of a second seven-year term. Scelba declared the candidate should not be a Christian Democrat. The Liberals. Social Democrats and Scelba's own faction in the Christian Democrats were willing to support Einaudi. Fanfani was not. At an eleventh-hour meeting before the Deputies and Senators gathered in Rome's big Montecitorio Palace to vote, Fanfani imposed his compromise candidate: Cesare Merzagora, 56, president of the Senate. As the Christian Democrats filed into the chamber, they got a printed reminder from Boss Fanfani: "Party discipline requires you vote for Merzagora."

The Force of Rebellion. At the first secret ballot, Fanfani got a rude shock. There were 382 Christian Democrats on hand. But Merzagora got only 228 votes. There were 130 votes for Einaudi, 30 votes for Gronchi. Frantically, during the long Italian lunch hour, Fanfani scurried from one party member to another, cracking the whip. But on the second ballot Merzagora not only did not gain, but lost a few votes. What was worse, the conservative faction within the Christian Democrats, which includes former Premier Giuseppe Pella, began voting for Left-Winger Gronchi. This was their revenge against Party Secretary Fanfani, who, when he took over the Christian Democrat machinery nine months ago, had ruthlessly ejected these old-line leaders from the party's executive committee.

The Communists and Nenni Socialists bided their time. Their candidate, who led on the first ballot, dropped out. On the third ballot, near midnight, the Socialists threw their 100-odd votes to Gronchi, sending him surging into the lead. All night long, before the fourth ballot, Fanfani tried to stem the rebellion. He got Merzagora to write out a letter withdrawing his candidacy in favor of Einaudi. Then, with Scelba, he went to Gronchi and asked him to withdraw too. Gronchi refused. "You have always believed in force," he told Fanfani. "Now that I am stronger than you are, I don't see why I should do any such thing." Knowing that the Communists would throw their bloc of nearly 200 votes to Gronchi on the next ballot, Fanfani and Scelba gave up. To avoid the humiliation of a public defeat at the hands of the Communists and Socialists, they agreed to switch what votes they still controlled to Gronchi. Fanfani went to Gronchi and embraced him. When the last ballot was counted, Gronchi had a thumping 658 votes out of the possible 843.

The Charge Resented. Italy's new President is a militant Catholic, an engaging conversationalist, and a hobbyist with a passion for model trains, which fill one room of his Rome apartment. Born near Pisa in modest circumstances, he worked his way through college, was an early leader of the Catholic workers' movement, was decorated for gallantry three times in World War I. A founding member of Don Luigi Sturzo's Popular Party, predecessor of the Christian Democrats, Gronchi served briefly in Mussolini's first government in 1922, but rapidly soured on II Duce and was forced out of public life by Mussolini's displeasure. A leader of Italy's underground in World War II, he served as Minister of Industry and Commerce in various governments during the Allied occupation. The Allies found Gronchi a proud and stubborn man. Once when Gronchi protested a law demanded by the Allied Control Commission, an Allied officer banged his fist on the table and told Gronchi: "I give you seven days. It is ample. I shall expect your draft by then." Gronchi coldly slid the folder across the table and said: "Draw up the law yourself. We shall have to submit to it, because we are a defeated people. But you cannot make us say we approve of what we do not."

Gronchi bitterly resents the frequent charge that he is neutralist and antiNATO. Says he: "For eight years my name in Italy has been synonymous with Kerensky. For eight years they depicted me as an enemy of the Atlantic way, thus insulting and offending me in three ways: first as a sensible person, second as a good Italian, third as a politician. To call me a Kerensky is to insult me."

But his good friend Pietro Nenni, winner of the Stalin Peace Prize, who has been pushing hard to infiltrate the government, was openly delighted to have Gronchi as President. In all probability, Gronchi's victory means that the days of Premier Scelba are numbered. And faced with such a personal rebuff, it was hard to see how Amintore Fanfani could long continue as party secretary. Whatever Gronchi might or might not do as President until 1962, his election in an atmosphere of doubt, ambiguity and faction, proved that there is nothing resembling strong leadership in Italian politics generally, or in the Christian Democratic Party in particular.

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