Italy

DURING THE 20th century and into the 21s, the parties of the Italian left have been involved in countless dog-bites-man plots that have badly served their cause and marginalized their numerous votes into decades of opposition.

The first organized party of the Italian left was the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which was founded in 1893 by trade unions and socialists. In the early decades of the 20th century, the radical left wing of the party clashed with the reformist wing. At the Livorno Conference in 1921, the left, which included important future leaders such as Palmiro Togliatti, Antonio Gramsci, Umberto Terracini, and Angelo Tasca, broke away to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI). During the fascist regime, members of the PSI and the PCI were persecuted and sometimes murdered. The Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, for example, was killed in 1924 and Benito Mussolini admitted his responsibility in the action at the Chamber of Deputies in January 1925 with a speech that inaugurated the 20 years of fascist dictatorship. The communist leader and Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci also died following his eight years in the fascist prisons.

In spite of the split consummated at the Livorno Conference, the PSI and the PCI were united in their fight against fascism and their alliance continued until the mid-1950s, when the PSI censured the Soviet Union after its invasion of Hungary. The two parties actually reunited under the common list of the Fronte Democratico Popolare (Popular-Democratic Front) in the 1948 election after they had been ousted from the government [Page 245]led by the Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi due to American pressure. Yet, the dawning of the Cold War, the paranoid rhetoric of the election, and the active anti-left propaganda of the Vatican contributed to the poor result of the Fronte Popolare led by Togliatti and Pietro Nenni. It barely obtained the 30 percent of the vote against the impressive 48.5 percent of the Christian Democrats (DC).

After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the two parties progressively took separate political directions. In 1963, the PSI joined or supported center-left governments led by the Christian Democrats, although the following year its left-wing members abandoned the party to form the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity). The alliance with the DC caused a hemorrhage of votes in favor of the PCI, which became the major Communist Party in Western Europe. After the death of Togliatti and the brief leadership of Luigi Longo, the PCI was able to threaten the Christian Democrats as the largest Italian political party under Enrico Berlinguer's charismatic direction. Berlinguer, who as Longo's deputy had condemned the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and openly criticized Soviet Communism at a conference in Moscow the following year, led the party to its best electoral results in 1975 and 1976, when the gap between the PCI and the DC narrowed to a mere 5 percent.

Yet, Berlinguer's political line was not simply characterized by antagonism toward the Christian Democrats. On the contrary, in 1973, he launched the proposal for a coalition between the two parties to modernize and strengthen the Italian democracy. This proposal was soon called compromesso storico (historical compromise) and led the PCI to give its external support to Christian Democratic governments during the 1970s at a time when Italy was badly affected by terrorist actions from both right- and left-wing extremists. Though Togliatti and Longo had already distanced the party from Moscow, Berlinguer achieved a complete independence from Soviet communism and shifted the PCI to more pro-Western positions.

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