Rome

On the World Today

FOR the 2 million citizens of Rome and for 47 million Italians, 1954 is likely to be remembered as a scandal-ridden year in which the prestige of democracy and governmental instability reached a new post-war low. While the Wilma Montesi case has certainly been the most sensational to have erupted in ihe Italian capital in years, the fact is that it has only been one of several scandals.

Early last summer, for example, one of those numerous aging palaces that form part of the Eternal City’s special ancestral charm—the Palazzo Vitteleschi — caved in, killing several masons who happened to be at work in the interior. The ensuing investigation revealed that the building had long ago been condemned as unsafe for human habitation. However, since it belonged to a cabinet minister for whom it was a source of revenue, permission had been obtained to have a couple of new floors for apartments added on top of it: and, strangely enough, the contract for this particular piece of work had been granted to the architect son of the Mayor of Rome.

Such unsavory examples of corruption and nepotism in the highest circles of government have inevitably increased that inborn skepticism with which the Italians, like any Latin people, tend to treat politics and politicians. This skepticism today particularly embraces the Christian Democratic Party, which has been in power uninterruptedly for more than eight years.

Christian Democratic split

The disclosures have come at an exceedingly awkward moment for the Christian Democratic Party, which for more than a year has found itself being increasingly split into left-wing and rightwing factions over what its future domestic policy should be.

In fact, this crisis has been brewing for years. But as long as the party was without any question the dominant political group in the peninsula, as it was from 1948 down to June, 1953, when it enjoyed the support of 48 per cent of the electorate and had an absolute majority of 306 deputies in an Assembly of 590, the crisis never came to a head. Disagreement within the party there was; but underlying it was a tacit agreement not to push differences of opinion to the point of destroying the party’s fragile unity and its hold on political power.

In the elections of June, 1953, the Christian Democratic Party lost some 2 million votes in the country and 44 seats in the Assembly. Since then the Christian Democrats have had to seek support for a governmental majority either from the left, by allying themselves with the 38 deputies of the Liberal, Republican, and Social Democratic splinter groups, or from the right, by allying themselves with the 39 Monarchists or the 25) Neo-Fascists of the lower chamber. The parly has been forced to make a cruel choice, which the late Alcide de Gasperi managed to avoid during his seven years as Premier, between a genuinely left-wing and rightwing social policy.

Poverty in Italy

In giving Togliatti’s Communists and Nenni’s Socialists 1.5 million more votes than they had won in 1948, the elections of 1953 offered an unmistakable warning signal that a policy of ingenious temporization, no matter how subtly pursued, could not be carried on forever, and that one day a more determined and drastic policy would have to be introduced to cope with Italy’s increasingly serious social situation.

This warning was dramatically underlined just one month after the elections with the publication in July of last year of the Vigorelli Report — the result of the first full-scale parliamentary investigation into the conditions of poverty ever to have been made in Italy. It had vaguely been known that Italy suffered from a chronic blight of some 2 million unemployed, with another million partially unemployed. With a series of appalling statistics, the Vigorelli Report brought home to everyone just what these figures really mean.

Among other things, it revealed that no less than 22 per cent of the Italian people today live in improper habitations or overcrowded houses, that 2 per cent live in cellars and another 1 per cent in caves, that 7.5 per cent of the population are so poor that they cannot afford to buy meat, sugar, or wine, that 70 per cent of the children born into poorer families in Sicily die in their first year, that in southern Italy the average work span for agricultural laborers is just 78 days a year, and that for Italy as a whole the agricultural work span averages only 110 days.

One result of the publication of this report was to give new strength and determination to the progressive wing of the Christian Democratic Party, called the Movement of Democratic Initiative, which believes that drastic social changes are necessary to prevent the Communists from making further serious advances, particularly among the impoverished peasants of southern Italy. It was this wing of the party, led by its dynamic leader, Amintorc Fanfani, which precipitated the first serious crisis in the Christian Democratic Party last December, by withdrawing its confidence from the then Premier, Giuseppe Pella.

Pella has always been the advocate of strict financial orthodoxy. As de Gasperi’s Finance Minister he won the reputation of being the “bulwark of the lira” for his uncompromising demand for a stable currency and a balanced budget. But the price of such an inflexible policy can easily be unemployment.

The rise of the progressives

As early as 1949, when he was Minister of Labor in de Gasperi’s fifth cabinet, Fanfani fell out with Pella over this issue, and resigned when he could not get his way. As a result, de Gasperi’s sixth cabinet did not include a single member of the Fanfani wing of the party, which at that time was in the minority. The most important development in the Christian Democratic Party since then has been the gradual emergence of this wing as the dominant political group in the party.

It was first evident in the summer of 1953, when de Gasperi appointed Fanfani Minister of the Interior in his short-lived post-election cabinet — the first clear indication that here was the man who was being groomed to become his successor. It was made even clearer last December, when Fanfani, after engineering Pella’s fall, was called upon to form the next Christian Democratic government.

Though he failed, Fanfani came out of the attempt with undiminished prestige in the party. On the eve of do Gasperi’s fall, last January, the Premier rose in Parliament to plead in favor of Fanfani. De Gasperi’s speech did not save Fanfani, but it meant that the weight of the party’s most respected and influential politician was officially behind him.

At the party’s Fifth Congress, which was held in Naples from June 26 to 21), Fanfani and his supporters, with the blessing of de Gasperi, made a clean sweep of all the conservative veterans of the older generation. They were replaced by representatives of the Democratic Initiative, who today constitute 70 per cent of the party’s membership and 50 per cent of its deputies in both houses of Parliament.

Fanfani and social reform

This dynamic 45-year-old Tuscan is in some respects for Italy what Mendès-France is for France. Like his French contemporary, Fanfani is a forthright man who knows just what he wants and who makes no bones about saying it openly. His notable triumph at the Congress in Naples is a tribute to his tireless grassroots work within the party during the last year.

A brilliant student in his youth, Fanfani was made Professor of Economies at the Catholic University of Milan when he was just twenty-eight years old. It was there that he founded the Democratic Initiative Movement with his two friends, Giorgio La Pira, the flamboyant mayor of Florence who has been compared with St. Francis of Assisi and with Savonarola, and Giuseppe Dossetti, for many years a Christian Democratic deputy, who recently retired from politics and went back to teaching economics at the University of Bologna.

Like Mendès-Franee, Fanfani has long been a champion of bold economic and social reforms, but he has never been a political lone wolf. Having served in different governments as Minister of Labor, Agriculture, and the Interior, he has had considerable ministerial experience.

A man of proverbial stamina, capable of living for days on little more than apples and cat naps, he Jirst achieved fame as Minister of Labor in de Gasperi’s fourth and fifth cabinets by wearing down the resistance of management and labor disputants in round-the-clock conferences that went on for days. He also launched an energetic program of cheap housing for workers, jointly financed by workers, employers, and the government, whereby tens of thousands of “Fanfani houses" have been constructed.

Togliatti’s subtle meaneuver

The great dilemma now facing Fanfani and the Christian Democrats is how progressive steps to succor the workers and the unemployed can be undertaken without, involving the party and the church in compromising alliances with the Communists. Though the Catholic Labor Movement, which Fanfani was instrumental in launching some years ago, has made considerable progress recently, the fact remains that the great majority of workers are still either Togliatti Communists or Nenni Socialists. Anyone wishing to espouse the workers’ cause, therefore, naturally finds himself, willingly or not, allied with the Communists and the Socialists.

The more socially-conscious Italian Catholics have not allowed this to deter them from favoring the workers in their fight with management, when they thought their cause was just. But there are other equally influential Italian Catholies who regard any such alliance with the Communists, no matter how transient or accidental, as an unholy pact with the devil.

It is precisely to exploit this embarrassing situation that Palmiro Togliatti, who is probably the subtlest Communist leader in Western Europe today, has recently taken up the cry “The Church with us!" and begun to expound the fantastic theory that Christ and Marx were really preaching the same social message. The aim of this maneuver is obvious: to increase the suspicions and the uncompromising reactionary attitude of the right-wing Catholic “Integrists" and to put them at loggerheads with the champions of progressive reforms, thereby widening the already dangerous split within the Christian Democratic Party and the church.

Much in this latent conflict between right and left will depend on the attitude finally adopted by the Vatican, which has had and will continue to have considerable influence on the formulation of Christian Democratic policy in Italy. Up until his grave illness of last February, Pope Pius XII was understood to be favorably disposed toward bold social initiatives. But since then there have been signs that the more ultramontane members of the Sacred College have come to exercise an unprecedented influence over the actions of His Holiness.

Italy new oil industry

In practical economic terms, the conflict between left and right in the Christian Democratic Party is likely to center upon the future re of Italy’s oil industry.

At the Christian Democratic Congress in Naples last June, a special report on the nation’s long-range industrial needs was presented by Ezio Vunoni, one of the party’s leading economists and Scelba’s Minister of the Budget. The report estimated that no less than 4 million new jobs must be found in the next ten years:

I million alone to absorb an expanding population which increases by some 250,000 a year; 1.3 million to absorb the major part of the unemployed (which would leave a margin of some 800,000 “ frictionnlly" unemployed, or 4 per cent of the total of the nation’s jobholders); and another 1.7 million to give work to partially employed farm laborers.

The question is: How can so many jobs be created in a country which is not wealthy in mineral resources, particularly not in iron and coal? Furthermore, where are the massive amounts of capital going to come from which will be needed to finance such an ambitious program? Certainly it will take far more than the modest $175 million which the Italian government last year granted the Cassa per il Alezzogiorno (an autonomous agency like TVA) for road and dam construction, land reclamation, and tourist development in Sicily, Sardinia, and the backward provinces of Puglia and Calabria.

One answer which is now being considered in the highest Italian governmental circles is the possibility of pushing forward in the exploitation of the country’s hitherto untapped oil resources. At the present time the natural gas industry in the Po Valley is the most rapidly advancing major industry in Italy. Last year, where the output of hydroelectric power increased by some 9 per cent, that of natural gas jumped by 60 per cent. The existence of this important source of energy in the north has led certain American geologists to the conclusion that Italy is sitting on an oil reservoir that is potentially the greatest in Western Europe. One American company is prepared to invest $100 million in immediate prospecting.

So far, the only place in Italy where sizable prospecting is being carried out and where oil has actually been discovered is Sicily. Four foreign petroleum companies have already taken out concessions there. One of them, the Gulf Oil Company, struck oil with the first shaft it sank.

What has encouraged these foreign concerns to go ahead here is the favorable legislation introduced by the autonomous Sicilian Parliament in Palermo to attraet foreign investment in 1949. But on the mainland the situation is entirely different. Here all natural gas and petroleum operations are controlled by the state-owned AGIP (Associazioue (Jenerale Italiana Petrolifern), which since last year has enjoyed a virtual monopoly. Its director is Enrico Mattei, a bustling, ambitious former partisan leader, who, not content to control all oil operations on the peninsula, has recently allied himself with the Communists in Sicily in an attempt to get the existing legislation here reversed.

Mattei is determined to maintain the nationalization of Italy’s oil operations which has kept foreign companies out of the mainland. In thins he has the support of a considerable number of deputies who, for one reason or another, are dependent on his patronage. Until recently both Vanoni and Fanfani were known to be fairly favorable to Mattei. But both are now understood to have begun to harbor doubts about the wisdom of continuing to protect a home industry that has neither the capital nor the technicians necessary to embark on full-scale expansion.

Last year, for example, AGIP got just $20 million to finance its new developments or about one fifteenth of the sum that was poured into the development of Canada’s Saskatchewan basin. At that rate Italy might have to wait ten or fifteen years before beginning to get appreciable results. The question is: Can she afford to wait that long?