Christian Democrats: On a Shaky Unicycle

At a solemn civic ceremony in Italy's southern port city of Salerno recently, wartime resistance veterans, local dignitaries and somber-suited representatives of the major political parties assembled to observe the 31st anniversary of the Liberation. Suddenly, a gang of left-wing toughs charged into the Christian Democrats' contingent and seized and burned their party flags --as if they had no right to be there.

In movie theaters round the country the most talked-about new film is Todo Modo (In Every Way), a surrealistic thriller built around a savage portrayal of the Christian Democratic leadership, including Aldo Moro, the country's Premier. In one scene, Marcello Mastroianni, playing a satanic priest, conducts a doom-laden spiritual retreat for the Christian Democratic chiefs, and snarls at them: "After 30 years in power, how much longer do you really think you have? You are all dead, can't you understand? Dead!"

The savaging of the country's lone great middle-of-the-road party--in art as well as life--has become almost a national political sport in mid-1970s Italy. If the Communists emerge from the June 20th parliamentary elections with a claim to national power, the fundamental cause will be the serious erosion of the Christian Democrats in the modern Italy that they very largely created. Today the party is maligned and ridiculed as never before--and from every corner of Italian society. Urban youths rail against it as sclerotic and establishmentarian. Women, swept up in a drive for legal abortion and other rights, have turned away from it as unresponsive to their needs. Middle-class Italians, once the party's backbone, grumble about its ineffectiveness and vulnerability to scandal and corruption. Italian editorial writers ceaselessly dissect the party's "crisis" and discover new symptoms of its logoramento--exhaustion.

At the same time, more and more Italians seem to have persuaded themselves, often reluctantly, that the only way to deal with Italy's economic drift and political scandals is to rap the Christian Democrats with a Communist vote. In local and municipal elections last June, Italy's self-confident Communists won almost 34% of the vote, compared with just above 35% for the Christian Democrats. Since then, the Christian Democrats, though thoroughly aroused to their plight, scarcely seem to have recovered any political ground. Says Small Businessman Eugenic Buontempo of Naples, reflecting the resigned attitude of millions of his countrymen: "We've tried everything else; we might as well try the Communists." Gianni Agnelli, head of the giant Fiat company and Italy's foremost industrialist, describes the Christian Democratic government today as "confused" and "incapable."

Improbable Beginning. Those have not always been apt adjectives for Italy's Christian Democrats, who have held national power longer than any other Western European party--and with considerable benefit for Italy. Then how to account for the party's steep decline, a slide that poses serious questions not only for the long-term survival of democracy in Italy but for the future of NATO and the European Community as well?

Improbable as it seems to many of its present-day critics, the party started out as a genuinely reformist movement. Established early in this century by a populist priest from Sicily, Don Luigi Sturzo, the Christian Democratic movement was the first mass-based Catholic party in Italy. Dissolved by Mussolini and revived after World War II, the party reached its greatest national strength in the late 1940s. Under Sturzo's protege Alcide de Gasperi, it held an absolute majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and expelled the Communists from De Gasperi's fourth postwar unity Cabinet. The party rode the popular idealism of Italy's return to democracy. Many of its leaders had been persecuted by Mussolini's Fascists, and served in the Resistance; their return to power seemed to usher in a genuinely liberal, reformist era. For example, in the brooding, once impoverished Polesine, the Po River delta south of Venice, the Christian Democrats were able to wrest power from the Marxists by pressing a vigorous land-to-the-tillers program. The party spent lavishly on flood control, construction of barns and houses, and equipment for mechanized farming. Industrialization gradually transformed the purely agricultural character of the Polesine, creating a modern working class and urban prosperity.

Similar developments took place elsewhere in Italy. Using a combination of Christian moral ideals and political realism, the party shepherded the country through a long period of tricky and often wrenching social change, while managing to maintain social peace. Says Rome University Sociologist Franco Ferrarotti, a former "independent left" Deputy: "If I were a Christian Democrat, I would point out the undeniable facts of recent history--'We took in our arms a country with homes destroyed, with streets in the air, with unemployment between 6 million and 7 million --the worst in Europe, and perhaps in the world. Then, in less than 20 years, even if it was allowed to take place in a wild way, this country underwent an industrial transformation that required nothing less than two centuries in other countries, like Britain.' "

Some of the chief accomplishments: an excellent system of superhighways, universities open to all high school graduates, a free compulsory education program that virtually eliminated illiteracy, a comprehensive rural electrification program and a G.N.P. that grew from $11.6 billion in 1948 to $165.2 billion last year. At the same time, Christian Democratic governments presided over an epic migration of some 11 million Italians from the sere poverty of the rural south and east to new jobs and new lives in the industrial north and west.

While managing--mostly successfully--a period of massive social change, the Christian Democrats also got caught in a political dilemma that is unique in Western democracy. In 30 years they never went into opposition, primarily because their only effective rival, the Communists, always seemed too drastic an alternative to most Italians. Thus Italy, reports TIME'S Rome Bureau Chief Jordan Bonfante, "became a political unicycle without a spare tire. Denied the reinvigoration and change that periods in opposition allow, the Christian Democrats literally got stuck in power. As its leaders are fond of complaining, they became 'doomed to govern.' "

Along the way, much of the party's original idealism became overlaid with the negligence, arrogance and corruption that led to the Communists' big electoral gains--and exposed the party's present weaknesses:

FEUDING FIEFS. Following De Gasperi's death in 1954, the party began to divide up along ideological and geographical lines into jealous fiefs ruled by various political princes. The factions stood together during elections but resumed a debilitating power struggle once the votes had been counted. Today, for instance, the most powerful group, the conservative Dorotei, "owns" about 27% of the party's membership, while the leftwing, urban-based Forze Nuove has 10%. Overall, the party is divided into two roughly equal, opposing camps, one old-guard conservative and the other comparatively youthful and progressive. In this standoff situation, pivotal power is usually held by Aldo Moro's Morotei faction, which commands only 8% of the party membership but has enough swing-seat muscle to control the top government jobs.

The party's shifting and sometimes unstable factional alliances have led to the revolving-door premierships that have long plagued the country. Moro has been Premier five times, Mariano Rumor five times, and current President Giovanni Leone twice.

Some local bosses maintain a sort of closed party shop, stuffing the membership rolls with cronies--or, as party reformers themselves say, even the names of dead people, for whom they pay membership dues. The result has been an entrenched elite, inured to change and the claims to power of young, reformist members. Complains Giovanni Prandini, 36, a Christian Democratic Deputy from Brescia: "The whole party is designed and built for the indefinite preservation of power, not its passage. It is organized in a strict oligarchy that blocks the young, either by compromising or suffocating them."

CLIPBOARD POLITICIANS. In its postwar heyday, party and people communicated through Catholic Action and other church-connected grassroots social organizations operating all over the country. But in the 1960s, as the clipboard-carrying technocrats who followed De Gasperi became absorbed in managing Italy's then burgeoning economy, the party's power base gradually shifted to an equally burgeoning sotto-governo, an "undergovernment" of state-controlled industries and agencies commanding power and patronage in virtually every area of Italian life. Eventually this machine came to be used to maintain power for its own sake, and the Christian Democrats' era of scandal began.

While only the most spectacular cases, such as the Lockheed payoff accusations, make headlines abroad, Italians are regularly treated to other stories of political chicanery, like the recent discovery of the names of several lawyers and merchants on the rolls of the Naples sanitation department, which paid them salaries though they never so much as touched a broom.

Certainly the Communists themselves have not been completely immune from scandal. In Parma recently two Communists were implicated in a zoning and construction scandal, and in Casoria, near Naples, two more have been charged with taking bribes from a supermarket chain. Nevertheless, as the party in power, the Christian Democrats naturally have been tarred the most. As the country's public payroll swelled to more than 2 million--about one government employee for every 27 citizens --the bureaucracy became hopelessly inefficient. One example: so many unpaid indemnity claims remain from World War II that, at the present rate of processing, the paper shufflers in Rome will not get to the bottom of the pile until the year 2033.

MISSED REFORMS. In the early 1960s, when it began to govern through center-left coalitions with the Socialists, the party embarked on an ambitious program of reforms intended to yank social issues away from the Communists. But most of the plans--for new schools, hospitals, housing, public transport --never left the drawing boards, often because some party chieftain or swashbuckler from the sottogoverno found a reason why a project might infringe on his interests. Result: an opening for far-left politicians to claim that, as Communist Union Official Alessandro Curzi puts it, "the Christian Democrats cannot bring themselves to overcome a conflict of interest for the general welfare."

Still, for all of these shortcomings, it is difficult to blame the Christian Democrats wholly for their basic political problem, which is that they have not kept abreast of the changes in Italian society that they themselves helped to stir up. The more Italy became industrialized and urbanized, the more the party lost touch with its original natural constituency. In newly industrialized areas like the Polesine and the southern steel city of Taranto, the party faces a cruel irony: as young, church-going peasants moved off the farms and into the factories created by Christian Democratic policies, they tended to turn left politically. Concedes Giulio Veronese, 44, a Polesine Christian Democratic leader: "Our problem is that we have no organization representing us in the factory shop, in the schools, wherever people are massed together--nothing to match the Marxist unions."

Searching Hard. One early indicator of the peril that the Christian Democrats faced in the new Italy they created came in the "hot autumn" of 1969 when the unions, influenced by the previous year's student-worker "revolution" in France, launched a campaign of strikes that shattered the social peace of the country. Then, two years ago, the Christian Democrats made a serious miscalculation by forcing the divorce question into a national referendum, which both exposed them to a humiliating defeat and cost them needed support among progressive Catholics. In the regional elections last June, the party lost its all-important monopoly on local patronage: Christian Democrats were toppled in Turin, Milan, the Piedmont region--indeed, in every major municipal administration except Rome and Palermo.

At the same time, party strength in some other old bastions has been crumbling fast. The judicial system, once a Christian Democratic preserve, has had an influx of aggressive young magistrates who are not inclined to spare the party from their investigative zeal. Even higher-ranking army officers are no longer automatically anti-left. As a Communist parliamentary floor leader, Alessandro Natta, accurately observes, "The whole hierarchy of national powers has been slipping out of their hands."

As a consequence, many Christian Democrats have been searching hard for a way to rejuvenate the party. For a while, in fact, it appeared that reformists intent on bringing in new leaders had gained the upper hand over the party's old guard. One sign was the election last July of Benigno Zaccagnini, 64, an appealing, conciliatory former pediatrician from Ravenna, as party secretary in place of the irascible, fervently conservative Amintore Fanfani.

Zaccagnini's backers began drafting plans for reshaping the Italian economy --less emphasis on cars, TVs and other private consumer goods, more on those neglected mass-transportation facilities, hospitals and schools--and overhauling the party bureaucracy. But the reformist drive has now virtually halted because of the early elections; there is too little time for the party to launch the kind of thoroughgoing program that will regain the confidence of the unions and entice the breakaway Socialists back into another center-left coalition.

But later on, possibly only after another chastening election humiliation, some Christian Democrats see a broad if necessarily gradual renewal, either in an uneasy coalition with the left or in opposition to a Communist-dominated government. "It's the logic of the democratic system to go into opposition," argues Industry Minister Carlo Donat-Cattin, 56, the leader of the Forze Nuove faction. "That's how the system defends and regenerates itself." Even so, there is an obvious hitch: the possibility that the Christian Democrats might stay in opposition for good if the Communists turn out to be less than the committed democrats they profess to be. Says Donat-Cattin with a rueful smile: "This is the little problem that's before us."

A Hope. Many Christian Democrats believe that the party--or Italy, for that matter--will not have to face that problem this spring after all. They are persuaded that the Communists will not do as well this June as they did in last year's local elections. To a great extent, the Communists' success back then was due to a large protest vote. But the issue this time, notes Tourism Minister Adolfo Sarti, "is not Communists but Communism. The Italian knows the difference." Sarti believes that the Christian Democrats will hold on to their current 267 seats in the Chamber of Deputies because of a deep-seated conviction among Italians that "the Christian Democrats can defend the fundamental values--liberty and the West."

Finally, there is a widespread belief --or at least a hope--that the Christian Democrats may yet find hidden reserves of political resiliency. "I don't believe that this is a death agony," says Sociologist Franco Ferrarotti. He points out that the party has survived other crises, including, in 1960, a short-lived flirtation with an alliance with neo-Fascists and a brush with civil disorder after the police fired on a crowd of demonstrators. Says Ferrarotti: "These comebacks show that there is an underlying resiliency. With an uncanny ability to reconcile opposing and contrasting positions in its own ranks, the party not only survived but came out on top." Whether or not it can do so again is clearly the greatest test yet to face the party that until now has been virtually synonymous with government in Italy.

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