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Most observers of the European scene class De Gasperi—along with such men as Germany's Adenauer, France's Schuman and Belgium's Spaak—as a topflight and selfless statesman-politician. Few would call him a "great man." But time & again he has been paid a handsome tribute in a land where the simple goodness of a Francis of Assisi, the Italians' patron saint, is more admired than the brilliance of a Thomas Aquinas."He is a good man," explains one Italian. "He means what he says.""De Gasperi," said a top U.S. diplomat who has long worked with the Premier, "has done more to advance democratic government than any other statesman in Europe today. To take a country which has undergone 20 years of Fascist rule, and just come through a devastating war, and build it up as he has. is nothing short of political genius.""It Looks Easy." Always slashing and ripping at his flanks were Togliatti's Communists and the fellow-traveling Socialists of Pietro Nenni. First they were in De Gasperi's coalition, infiltrating, sabotaging, preparing to take over a la Prague.
De Gasperi threw them out (1947) in one of the boldest, most important decisions of the cold war. A few months later he met them over the ballot boxes—an enemy more ruthless, more disciplined, better organized than his own wobbly coalition. While many Italians with faint hearts and fat pocketbooks began planning flight from the country, De Gasperi and his allies licked the enemy—fair, square and decisively. "He has done this thing," the U.S. diplomat says, "and because he has done it successfully, it looks easy. But if he hadn't done it, Italy would have gone Communist." For his past victories (and also for many of his current handicaps), De Gasperi is indebted to probably the queerest political alliance in Italian history, a restless, unstable mixture of most of the colors on the political palette. His own Christian Democrats include monarchists and republicans, rebels and traditionalists, free enterprisers and welfare staters, clericals and anticlericals. It is, in every respect, a "center party," basted together by an abhorrence of extremes and a belief in moderation. It is a Catholic party, approved by the Vatican, largely dependent in the election campaign on the vigorous, vote-harvesting activities of the Catholic Action movement. Yet Christian Democracy's three allies in the campaign all have their roots in Italy's long and emphatic anticlerical past: The Republicans, the party born of Garibaldi and Mazzini. One of its chief figures, Randolfo Pacciardi, fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and Mussolini's volunteers, is now De Gasperi's devoted Defense Minister.
The Liberals, the party of Cavour, who sealed Garibaldi's military successes with the political coup that united Italian provinces and kingdoms into one nation. The Liberals, still anticlerical, supported the House of Savoy against the Pope (and the Republicans). Their appeal now is mostly to intellectuals.
The Social Democrats, headed by Giuseppe Saragat, who chose democracy when Pietro Nenni led the rest of the Socialists into alliance with the Communists. Saragat has some 2,000,000 followers, mostly in the industrial north.