In Italy, the protest and turbulence of 1968 were
not confined to student groups or to a rebellion
of youth, but spawned in their aftermath an
upsurge in the militancy of the industrial workers.
The divisions and weaknesses of the trade union
movement were overcome by local bargaining and
by the development of factory organisations – the
factory councils. The Marxist student-protest
movement struck real roots among the workers,
unlike in West Germany and France, where
protesting students met with little sympathy from
working people, whose taxes gave students time
for their sit-ins and endless debates; in Britain,
student protest and influence were negligible
outside the universities, prompting tolerant
amusement or perhaps criticism of the authorities
for allowing such disruption. In Italy the protests
and the breakdown of order were far more serious.
The ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 saw the spread of
many strikes, supporting demands for higher pay
and better working conditions. The Italian people
could no longer be easily led; there was a loss of
respect for institutions and for the political lead-
ership that extended through all parties and tra-
ditions. Labour legislation the following year, in
1970, gave the trade unionist more power. The
Italian economy began to suffer from characteris-
tic stress: inflation took off in the mid-1970s;
the sudden increase in oil costs hit the Italian
economy hard; workers’ wages outpaced produc-
tivity; the agricultural south lagged ever more
behind the industrial north. The expansion of theItalian economy slowed. Although the average
annual growth in GNP in the 1970s still exceeded
3 per cent, it gyrated wildly from year to year.
The economic upheavals and the social ferment
were reflected in the instability of governments
from 1968 to 1976. The Christian Democrats
hardly changed in electoral strength, but internal
divisions and the continued political jockeying
among coalition partners, who agreed on little
beyond the need to keep the communists out, pro-
duced one crisis government after another. The
trend was to form centre-left alignments, and the
contemporary legislation reflected this, as did
the distancing of politics from the demands of the
Church, as Italy became increasingly secularised.
In 1970 a civil divorce law finally passed through
parliament. Effective implementation, however,
required a referendum. The Church continued to
oppose divorce vehemently, and so did the leader-
ship of the Christian Democrats, but when the ref-
erendum was finally held in 1974 a majority of the
Italian population backed divorce. Women’s rights
too gradually made headway in Italy in the 1970s
and the 1980s, as elsewhere in the Western world.
And youth gained more influence, with the voting
age reduced from twenty-one to eighteen in 1974.
In another attempted reform of the Italian
political landscape, decentralisation and regional
autonomy were taken further. The first regional
elections of 1970 brought only limited progress;
they nevertheless made possible communist par-
ticipation in local government without admitting(^1) Chapter 72
CONTEMPORARY ITALY
PROGRESS DESPITE POLITICS