the destruction of the First Republic instead opened the way for a wholesale attack on the institutional and cultural inheritance of post-war Italy, from employment rights to anti-fascism and even the role of the Constitution itself. Indeed, the greater effect of the wave of anti-political sentiment was not to hand power back to ordinary citizens, but rather to prepare the way for reactionary, privatising, and even criminal forces able to exploit the void at the heart of public life. The ‘liberal revolution’ promised by the parties of the Second Republic would, in fact, prepare the perfect breeding ground for the Lega.
Addio, Prima Repubblica
The idea of numbering republics might seem rather strange – indeed, it is the invention of Italian journalists, seeking to delimit changes of the political times, rather than part of the state’s official name. This habit comes from across the Alps, where France is today on its 5ème République. In that country, four other republics have surged and crashed since the monarchy was first felled by the French Revolution. These states’ history has, on each occasion, been bracketed by crises in France’s place in the international order, whether due to the threat of invasion (1793), military defeat (1870, 1940, 1958), or revolution across the European continent (1848). These upheavals each brought a different constitutional regime that proposed to impose order over tumult – on three such occasions, the new republic came after a period of restored monarchical rule or foreign occupation. In Italy, the transitions from First to Second and Third Republic entailed no such violent breaks, or even constitutional change. But in each instance, the power sharing between the main parties ended in their collective collapse, and the rise of a new party system framed by different ideological imperatives.
Like their French counterparts, Italy’s republics have tended to stand or fall based on the country’s international position. The First Republic emerged from the fall of Mussolini’s empire, and its politics were essentially determined by the Cold War divide, first visible in the competing influences of the US–UK armies and mostly left-wing elements of the Resistance that had helped free Italy from Nazi–Fascist rule. In postwar months, the main forces that had gathered in the National Liberation Committee (the DC, the PCI, and the Socialist PSIUP) together wrote a new democratic constitution, bearing a spirit of progress and anti-fascist unity. Yet, already before the document was enacted, DC premier Alcide de Gasperi’s spring 1947 visit to the United States augured a political realignment. Returning bolstered by promises of Marshall Plan investment, he kicked the PCI and PSIUP out of the ruling coalition, leaving his own party as the pivot of all future governments.
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
