Expressionlessly, the handsome man with the greying blond hair and pale blue eyes read his own name aloud from ballot after ballot: "Gronchi . . . Gronchi . . . Gronchi . . ." At the 422nd time, the assembled Deputies and Senators of Italy's Parliament broke into applause, and Giovanni Gronchi, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, stopped reading and rose to acknowledge the cheers. He had just been elected President of the Republic of Italy.
Gronchi (pronounced gronc-key) is a Christian Democrat. But the loudest cheers came from the Communists and their fellow-traveling allies, Pietro Nenni's Socialists. Mario Scelba. the Christian Democratic Premier, stood in glum silence. He and Party Secretary Amintore Fanfani had done everything in their power to prevent the election of their fellow Christian Democrat. Gronchi's victory was a humiliating defeat for Scelba's shaky four-party coalition of the center; it was an open defiance of Fanfani's personal leadership of the big Christian Democratic Party, which has firmly guided Italy into the anti-Communist front since the war.
The Voice of Discipline. The President of the Republic, who lives in the palace of the kings, is chiefly charged with ceremonial entertaining, signing bills, opening trade fairs. But he has one decisive function: he designates the Premier. In the faction-ridden Christian Democratic Party, Gronchi is the leader of a group which advocates the "opening to the left." He is also his party's outstanding symbol of a leftist neutralist tendency. With Scelba's government riven by disputes, the danger is that Gronchi would, sooner or later, pick a Premier who would bring the Nenni Socialists and their Communist-minded policies into the government.
For weeks before the presidential election, Fanfani and Scelba had been conferring with the three minor parties of the coalition to decide who should succeed Luigi Einaudi, a Liberal, as President. Einaudi is widely respected, but he is 81, and many disliked setting a precedent of a second seven-year term. Scelba declared the candidate should not be a Christian Democrat. The Liberals. Social Democrats and Scelba's own faction in the Christian Democrats were willing to support Einaudi. Fanfani was not. At an eleventh-hour meeting before the Deputies and Senators gathered in Rome's big Montecitorio Palace to vote, Fanfani imposed his compromise candidate: Cesare Merzagora, 56, president of the Senate. As the Christian Democrats filed into the chamber, they got a printed reminder from Boss Fanfani: "Party discipline requires you vote for Merzagora."
The Force of Rebellion. At the first secret ballot, Fanfani got a rude shock. There were 382 Christian Democrats on hand. But Merzagora got only 228 votes. There were 130 votes for Einaudi, 30 votes for Gronchi. Frantically, during the long Italian lunch hour, Fanfani scurried from one party member to another, cracking the whip. But on the second ballot Merzagora not only did not gain, but lost a few votes. What was worse, the conservative faction within the Christian Democrats, which includes former Premier Giuseppe Pella, began voting for Left-Winger Gronchi. This was their revenge against Party Secretary Fanfani, who, when he took over the Christian Democrat machinery nine months ago, had ruthlessly ejected these old-line leaders from the party's executive committee.