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Improbable as it seems to many of its present-day critics, the party started out as a genuinely reformist movement. Established early in this century by a populist priest from Sicily, Don Luigi Sturzo, the Christian Democratic movement was the first mass-based Catholic party in Italy. Dissolved by Mussolini and revived after World War II, the party reached its greatest national strength in the late 1940s. Under Sturzo's protege Alcide de Gasperi, it held an absolute majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and expelled the Communists from De Gasperi's fourth postwar unity Cabinet. The party rode the popular idealism of Italy's return to democracy. Many of its leaders had been persecuted by Mussolini's Fascists, and served in the Resistance; their return to power seemed to usher in a genuinely liberal, reformist era. For example, in the brooding, once impoverished Polesine, the Po River delta south of Venice, the Christian Democrats were able to wrest power from the Marxists by pressing a vigorous land-to-the-tillers program. The party spent lavishly on flood control, construction of barns and houses, and equipment for mechanized farming. Industrialization gradually transformed the purely agricultural character of the Polesine, creating a modern working class and urban prosperity.
Similar developments took place elsewhere in Italy. Using a combination of Christian moral ideals and political realism, the party shepherded the country through a long period of tricky and often wrenching social change, while managing to maintain social peace. Says Rome University Sociologist Franco Ferrarotti, a former "independent left" Deputy: "If I were a Christian Democrat, I would point out the undeniable facts of recent history—'We took in our arms a country with homes destroyed, with streets in the air, with unemployment between 6 million and 7 million —the worst in Europe, and perhaps in the world. Then, in less than 20 years, even if it was allowed to take place in a wild way, this country underwent an industrial transformation that required nothing less than two centuries in other countries, like Britain.' "
Some of the chief accomplishments: an excellent system of superhighways, universities open to all high school graduates, a free compulsory education program that virtually eliminated illiteracy, a comprehensive rural electrification program and a G.N.P. that grew from $11.6 billion in 1948 to $165.2 billion last year. At the same time, Christian Democratic governments presided over an epic migration of some 11 million Italians from the sere poverty of the rural south and east to new jobs and new lives in the industrial north and west.
While managing—mostly successfully—a period of massive social change, the Christian Democrats also got caught in a political dilemma that is unique in Western democracy. In 30 years they never went into opposition, primarily because their only effective rival, the Communists, always seemed too drastic an alternative to most Italians. Thus Italy, reports TIME'S Rome Bureau Chief Jordan Bonfante, "became a political unicycle without a spare tire. Denied the reinvigoration and change that periods in opposition allow, the Christian Democrats literally got stuck in power. As its leaders are fond of complaining, they became 'doomed to govern.' "