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Certainly the Communists themselves have not been completely immune from scandal. In Parma recently two Communists were implicated in a zoning and construction scandal, and in Casoria, near Naples, two more have been charged with taking bribes from a supermarket chain. Nevertheless, as the party in power, the Christian Democrats naturally have been tarred the most. As the country's public payroll swelled to more than 2 million—about one government employee for every 27 citizens —the bureaucracy became hopelessly inefficient. One example: so many unpaid indemnity claims remain from World War II that, at the present rate of processing, the paper shufflers in Rome will not get to the bottom of the pile until the year 2033.
MISSED REFORMS. In the early 1960s, when it began to govern through center-left coalitions with the Socialists, the party embarked on an ambitious program of reforms intended to yank social issues away from the Communists. But most of the plans—for new schools, hospitals, housing, public transport —never left the drawing boards, often because some party chieftain or swashbuckler from the sottogoverno found a reason why a project might infringe on his interests. Result: an opening for far-left politicians to claim that, as Communist Union Official Alessandro Curzi puts it, "the Christian Democrats cannot bring themselves to overcome a conflict of interest for the general welfare."
Still, for all of these shortcomings, it is difficult to blame the Christian Democrats wholly for their basic political problem, which is that they have not kept abreast of the changes in Italian society that they themselves helped to stir up. The more Italy became industrialized and urbanized, the more the party lost touch with its original natural constituency. In newly industrialized areas like the Polesine and the southern steel city of Taranto, the party faces a cruel irony: as young, church-going peasants moved off the farms and into the factories created by Christian Democratic policies, they tended to turn left politically. Concedes Giulio Veronese, 44, a Polesine Christian Democratic leader: "Our problem is that we have no organization representing us in the factory shop, in the schools, wherever people are massed together—nothing to match the Marxist unions."
Searching Hard. One early indicator of the peril that the Christian Democrats faced in the new Italy they created came in the "hot autumn" of 1969 when the unions, influenced by the previous year's student-worker "revolution" in France, launched a campaign of strikes that shattered the social peace of the country. Then, two years ago, the Christian Democrats made a serious miscalculation by forcing the divorce question into a national referendum, which both exposed them to a humiliating defeat and cost them needed support among progressive Catholics. In the regional elections last June, the party lost its all-important monopoly on local patronage: Christian Democrats were toppled in Turin, Milan, the Piedmont region—indeed, in every major municipal administration except Rome and Palermo.