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Along the way, much of the party's original idealism became overlaid with the negligence, arrogance and corruption that led to the Communists' big electoral gains—and exposed the party's present weaknesses:
FEUDING FIEFS. Following De Gasperi's death in 1954, the party began to divide up along ideological and geographical lines into jealous fiefs ruled by various political princes. The factions stood together during elections but resumed a debilitating power struggle once the votes had been counted. Today, for instance, the most powerful group, the conservative Dorotei, "owns" about 27% of the party's membership, while the leftwing, urban-based Forze Nuove has 10%. Overall, the party is divided into two roughly equal, opposing camps, one old-guard conservative and the other comparatively youthful and progressive. In this standoff situation, pivotal power is usually held by Aldo Moro's Morotei faction, which commands only 8% of the party membership but has enough swing-seat muscle to control the top government jobs.
The party's shifting and sometimes unstable factional alliances have led to the revolving-door premierships that have long plagued the country. Moro has been Premier five times, Mariano Rumor five times, and current President Giovanni Leone twice.
Some local bosses maintain a sort of closed party shop, stuffing the membership rolls with cronies—or, as party reformers themselves say, even the names of dead people, for whom they pay membership dues. The result has been an entrenched elite, inured to change and the claims to power of young, reformist members. Complains Giovanni Prandini, 36, a Christian Democratic Deputy from Brescia: "The whole party is designed and built for the indefinite preservation of power, not its passage. It is organized in a strict oligarchy that blocks the young, either by compromising or suffocating them."
CLIPBOARD POLITICIANS. In its postwar heyday, party and people communicated through Catholic Action and other church-connected grassroots social organizations operating all over the country. But in the 1960s, as the clipboard-carrying technocrats who followed De Gasperi became absorbed in managing Italy's then burgeoning economy, the party's power base gradually shifted to an equally burgeoning sotto-governo, an "undergovernment" of state-controlled industries and agencies commanding power and patronage in virtually every area of Italian life. Eventually this machine came to be used to maintain power for its own sake, and the Christian Democrats' era of scandal began.
While only the most spectacular cases, such as the Lockheed payoff accusations, make headlines abroad, Italians are regularly treated to other stories of political chicanery, like the recent discovery of the names of several lawyers and merchants on the rolls of the Naples sanitation department, which paid them salaries though they never so much as touched a broom.