(See Cover) Across the ancient reaches of Italy—a sunny, beautiful and melancholy land—the clamor spread.
DE GASPERI is A LIAR! screamed a black headline in Rome's L'Unita, the Communist daily.
"Our nationalism," boasted the boss of resurgent Italian Fascism, "is not like the nationalism of De Gasperi." He spat the Premier's name as if it were uncapsuled quinine. "The enemy," added another Fascist, "is the Christian Democratic Party." To 62,000 intent Neapolitans a Communist speaker shouted: "How can De Gasperi talk of security when there are 2,500,000 unemployed?" And a few blocks away, the 'leader of the Monarchists cajoled. "The King— is waiting to come back" he said. "He waits in the sadness and the silence of exile." From both sides—the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right—came the attack on the young Republic of Italy. A national election, the third since war's end, was only a fortnight away. If the wolves could strike down Premier Alcide de Gasperi and his Christian Democratic Party, they could then get at the shaky-legged colt of Italian democracy.
Democracy and De Gasperi had taken on the Communists—the biggest, toughest Red party this side of the Iron Curtain-and roundly trounced them in the 1948 elections. But this time the Premier and his coalition must overcome the combined assault of:
The Communists. Still apparently at least as strong as they were in 1948, when they won 8 million of 26 million votes, captured 183 of the 574 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The Neo-Fascists. The Movimento Sociale Italiano, or M.S.I., which would like to put another dictator in power in Rome. M.S.I, leaders are true-blue survivors of Mussolini's coterie, members of the band who collaborated with the Germans to the bitter end. They have not yet found their Mussolini (nearest thing to one: Prince Valerio Borghese), but they have swelled their 525,000 votes (2.1%) of 1948 into considerably more. Bitter enemies of the Communists, they are willing to collaborate with them in mischief as Adolf Hitler did—to make stable democratic government impossible. They hope that in the resulting chaos they, not the Reds, will capture Rome.
The Monarchists, Led by Croesus-rich Mayor Achille Lauro of Naples, who campaigns with free spaghetti and royally vague promises, the right-wing Monarchists expect to do better than 1948's 730,000 (2.8%) of the vote—enough better, they hope, to force De Gasperi to bring them into the government. One difficulty: the exiled King refuses to endorse them.
Italy, a unified nation for only a century and a republic for only seven years, is free to choose. That fact in itself is a monument to Alcide de Gasperi, 72, the worn-looking but knife-sharp statesman who has brought a sense of unity and democratic faith to a people who still, in the tradition of centuries, are apt to consider themselves not so much Italians as Florentines or Romans or Neapolitans or Sicilians. ("You know." a Roman is apt to say, "I don't like the Florentines. They think they're better than anyone else.") De Gasperi's work is only partly done, and his dream of a united, stable and democratic Italy is only partly made real.