People’s Party, a newspaper editor and a member
of parliament in 1921, he opposed Mussolini and
was imprisoned for his pains. On the intervention
of the Pope, he was released in 1929 and spent
the next few years quietly employed in the
Vatican as a librarian, stealthily making contact
with Catholic anti-fascists in Milan, Florence and
Rome. Already in his sixties, he joined the active
resistance and earned wide respect, though he
lacked the charisma of a really popular leader. A
practising Catholic, his relations with the Vatican
remained close, but during the last years of his
political life he was careful not to let the Church
dominate the Christian Democratic Party. After
leading governments of national unity until May
1947 he thereafter headed coalitions with small
centrist parties, though the 1948 elections had
given the Christian Democrats – as it turned out
for the only time – an absolute majority. By the
time of De Gasperi’s sudden death from a heart
attack in 1954 (he had resigned the premiership
a year earlier) Italy was set on a course embody-
ing moderate, conservative policies and featuring
an economic boom, increasing integration with
the Western alliance and West European eco-
nomic union.
For four decades the Italian electorate has
shown extraordinary stability in its political pref-
erences. This seems to indicate that the associa-
tions and benefits the party could confer on
individuals were at least as important as consider-
ations of national policy. Shifts in voting patterns
were small, though sometimes crucial when it
came to bargaining to secure parliamentary
majorities for legislation.
De Gasperi resisted Vatican pressures to ally
with the right; instead, the Christian Democrats
established centrist coalitions with a reforming
programme. In the south, land reform divided up
large estates and gave land to the peasants to
farm. The government also wanted to lessen the
divisions between the poorest regions and the
industrial north. The Southern Italy Fund was
created to finance the building of infrastructures,
roads, aqueducts and irrigation schemes. The
hope was that tax concessions and various induce-
ments would tempt private industry south. Later
in the 1950s the government established factories
in the south, but few succeeded. The results of all
these reforming efforts fell far short of their aims.
The Christian Democratic share of the votes
declined after the high point of 1948 throughout
the 1950s and early 1960s and with this loss the
centrist coalitions became increasingly vulnerable,
finding themselves in a minority in overall parlia-
mentary votes. This, together with the tensions
within Christian Democracy as the reformists
looked left and the conservatives sought to move
to the right, was the main cause of government
unsteadiness. The Christian Democrats attempted
to bolster their parliamentary position by copying
a fascist device: they changed the electoral law so
that an electoral alliance gaining just over half of
the popular vote would obtain an almost two-
thirds majority of the seats in parliament. The
communist and Socialists bitterly attacked the
‘swindle law’.
But the new electoral law did not help the
Christian Democrat centrist coalition in the elec-
tions of June 1953, because they just failed to gain
1
THE TRIBULATIONS AND SUCCESSES OF ITALIAN DEMOCRACY 551
Chamber of Deputies elections, 1946–68 (percentage of votes)
1946 1948 1953 1963 1968
Communists (PCI) 18.96 22.46 25.31 26.96
31.03*
Socialists (PSD) 20.72 12.73 13.87
14.51*
Democratic Socialists (PSDI) – 7.09 4.52 6.11
Christian Democrats (DC) 35.18 48.48 40.08 38.27 39.09
Liberal Party (PLI) 6.79 3.38 3.02 6.99 5.83
Monarchists 2.70 2.78 6.86 1.77 1.31
Neo-Fascists (MSI) 5.30 2.01 5.85 5.11 4.46
Note: * 1948 elections, PCI and PSD combined vote; 1968 elections, PSD and PSDI combined vote.
