Hopes that the Resistance would drive a deep renovation of Italian institutions were rapidly thwarted. The House of Savoy’s attempts to backslide from its two-decade pact with Benito Mussolini were not enough to save it in the June 1946 referendum, when Italians narrowly voted to abolish the monarchy. Yet the immediate postwar years brought an amnesty for most Fascist-era crimes, thanks to legislation authored by PCI leader and erstwhile Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti in the name of restoring social peace. Just 1,476 of 143,871 Fascist-era officials examined by the purges commission were removed from their posts.4 At the same time, the myth of a unanimous national Resistance had the perverse effect of avoiding a reckoning with the past, not only sealing the legitimacy of the partisan minority but also exculpating the passive-to-collaborationist mass. After the end of the Resistance coalition in 1947, it was, instead, the Communists themselves who came most under scrutiny.
The end of the war and the economic ‘miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s were a moment of rapid industrialisation with few parallels in Europe, feeding optimism that Italy was leaving the bad old days behind it. Its stagnant institutional politics nonetheless lagged behind the many other modern-ising drives within Italian society. This particularly owed to the dominance of the DC. Not only could the party count on a solid base in the Catholic middle classes and rural South – guaranteeing it 35–40 per cent of the popular vote in each general election – but it enjoyed a US-backed stranglehold over the national institutions, as Italian NATO membership effectively forbade ministerial roles being entrusted to the PCI. Yet the DC did not have everything its own way. Its 1950s bid to legislate an automatic majority for the largest party was thwarted by smaller parties, and subsequent decades of coalition rule were marked by a constant balancing act between the democristiani’s internal factions and various minor-party allies.
This system faced a first major test in 1960, with an episode that threatened to bring the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement; MSI) into the mainstream. In the 1950s, this party founded by Mussolini nostalgists had drifted from anti-American and rhetorically anti-capitalist positions toward the search for alliance with DC hardliners, in which vein it gave its outside backing to two democristiano cabinets in the late 1950s. In 1960, when the Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Social-Democratic Party, a party of anti-communist social democrats) pulled out of their alliance with the Catholic centre party, the DC was left without a majority in parliament; appointed prime minister on 26 March 1960, the DC’s Fernando Tambroni thus formed a cabinet reliant on neofascist votes. Though the MSI was offered no ministerial roles, the signs of its emboldening – and its provocative bid to hold its congress in anti-fascist Genoa – sparked widespread opposition and even rioting. Over summer 1960, some eleven people were killed by police during anti-MSI protests.
However, this crisis ultimately served to marginalise the far right. The instability that Tambroni had fostered soon provoked a revolt among DC grandees, and by July they had forced him out of office, never to return to alliance with the MSI. Instead, the movement stretching from the industrial North to the Mafia-plagued farms of the South marked the onset of a class revolt not seen since the Resistance, which also helped impose a wider cordon sanitaire against the neofascists. Wary of further such disturbances coming from the left wing of the political spectrum, more liberal elements of the DC instead decided the time was right to integrate the Socialists into the so-called centrosinistra pact, in a ‘modern-ising’ arrangement that both preserved and renewed the DC’s central role to all coalition-making. Only in the 1980s would the DC hand the prime minister’s job to the centrist Republicans and later the Socialists ; it in all cases remained the dominant force in each cabinet.
The constant coalition-making was weakly responsive to electoral pressure. As journalist Paolo Mieli has noted, since national unification in 1861 the Italian electorate has only been able to impose a direct exchange of power between Left and Right twice (in 1996 and 2008), and it did not do so once during the First Republic (1948–92).5 The constant rise in the Communist vote from 1948 onward (first set back only in 1979) instead drew the other parties into closer cooperation. Able to treat the Italian state as if it were their own property in a ‘blocked democracy’, they operated on the basis of the Cencelli system, so named after a democristiano functionary who proposed dividing up ministries and public posts among party factions according to size, on the model of shareholders. This allowed them to share out not only government jobs but also control of tendering processes and influence over state agencies like public broadcaster Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI), on the basis of interparty agreements.
This cartelisation reached its peak in the 1980s, as the governments of the pentapartito alliance brought smaller and weaker rooted parties into institutional power-sharing. This five-party administration included all the main parliamentary forces except the Communists and neofascists and, in 1983, allowed the appointment, for the first time, of a Socialist prime minister – Bettino Craxi. The pentapartito epitomised the way in which the First Republic’s dominant forces could divide up posts and influence among themselves, indeed increasingly becoming factions integrated into the sharing of institutional power, rather than mass-membership parties. Craxi’s tenure marked a notable shift to the right for the Socialist Party, which both renounced its historic ties to Marxism and more sharply distanced itself from Enrico Berlinguer’s PCI. Yet he would enter the collective memory less as a heretic on the left than an embodiment of the corruption that brought the First Republic to its knees.
We have noted that Italy’s republics have tended to stand or fall based on the country’s international position. The end of the First Republic especially owed to the end of the Cold War, in particular insofar as the collapse of the Eastern Bloc served as the trigger for the dissolution of the PCI. Later, we will look more closely at the PCI’s demise and the consequences this had for the broader Italian left. Its immediate effect, however, was to undermine the solidarity on the other side of the political spectrum, among forces long cohered by their anti-communism. In autumn 1990 came revelations of Gladio, the so-called ‘stay-behind operation’ that NATO had developed in order to prepare military resistance to a PCI coup or Soviet invasion. When President Francesco Cossiga, in one of his characteristic outbursts, openly admitted his role in Gladio, the left-wing parties demanded his impeachment, soon forcing his resignation. Yet as Cossiga himself noted, once the Berlin Wall had fallen, the forces ‘pushing from the other side’ – notably the DC – were not going to be left standing either.6
The downfall of the old edifice began in 1992 with the arrest of the Socialist Mario Chiesa, a leading light in the Milan PSI. As administrator of the city’s Pio Albergo Trivulzio nursing home, Chiesa received tens of millions of lire in kickbacks from the cleaning company boss Luca Magni in exchange for contracts. When Magni, unable to withstand the mounting payments, finally reported the situation to the magistrate Antonio di Pietro, a sting operation was set in motion against the corrupt machine politician. On the early evening of 17 February, Magni entered Chiesa’s office with a secret microphone and camera; when the Socialist agreed to the transaction, as expected, the carabinieri burst into the room. Alarmed, Chiesa bolted into the toilet with the 37 million lire (about €20,000) in cash from another bribe, which he then attempted, in vain, to hide in the cistern. As the news spread across the TV networks, party boss Bettino Craxi tried to dismiss Chiesa as a ‘lone crook’: the Milan PSI, in the nation’s ‘moral capital’ was, after all run by ‘honest people’.
Not all were convinced. Already in a May 1991 article for Milan magazine Società civile, the magistrate Di Pietro