After ten years of nationhood, the Republic of Italy last week voted in numbers that might shame older democracies. On a leisurely, balmy Sunday, nearly 24 million Italians, 91.1% of the electorate, trooped to the polls to vote for mayors and councilmen in Italy's 7,143 communes. From a welter of confused and overlapping statistics emerged one clear fact: the Christian Democratic party, generally supposed to have been losing ground with the voters, is still the choice of more Italians than any other party, and has actually picked up a few percentage points since 1951.
For Premier Antonio Segni's government, it...