Are we really going to witness the closing of the transnational radical party? Will Marco Pannella (1) really quit his role, a "historical" role, the one Ernesto Galli della Loggia (2) illustrated so effectively on "Il Corriere della Sera"? Shall we really witness the dismantlement of the transnational experience, which is today so advanced, unrepeatable and exemplary?

The questions are many: but during yesterday's press conference, Marco Pannella dispelled all doubts. Once again, when it comes to making a decision, Pannella links the answer to the estimation of the risk, to an extreme challenge: either 30,000 Italians join the party, with membership cards paid at a price enabling the party to survive for a year, or back to zero...possibly as allies of Craxi...

From what we could gather, many personalities, starting from the Prime Minister, Giuliano Amato (3), will be attending the inauguration of the congress, in that ghastly Ergife hotel which the "radical" graphic designer Aurelio Candido - the penniless emulator of the Imaginative Panseca - will endeavour to make presentable and liveable. But what are they coming for? Obviously not to join the party. Their hypocrisy will prompt this formal act of homage and "support", but it won't make them actually pay the membership fee. Many of them will walk past the young people of the security service at the entrance without even paying the small fee which every participant pays to cover the organizational expenses. In practical terms, therefore, we can expect very little of them. Their faculty of political intervention is so impaired by the customariness and conveniences that it traps them, to use Reich's expression, into an armour of inner impossibilities. In these people, the "person", the "mask" has stifled the instin

ct, the possibility of a "gratuitous" but somehow significant act. Perhaps this is the fate of politics, but it isn't convincing in any case.

Today, Pannella is generally acknowledged a "strong" role in the logic and in the possibilities of an evolution of Italian and non-Italian politics. A man of final decisions, of irrevocable separations or unions, unpredictable ("pragmatic"?) and uncontrollable (especially with his own self), throughout his long story he nonetheless has the quality of "lasting" in coherence. A coherence which is never imposed by other people, but fundamentally based on two "strong" points since the birth of his early vocation: *himself* and *the law*, interpreted according to a visionary passion of ancient liberal origin, unscathed by historicist and structuralist degenerations. A man of the "right" who has always occupied a place in the heart of the "people of the left", thanks to a far-seeing intuition, and who has confronted all possible circumstance from this position, always "seeking" (more than "finding") solutions which could satisfy the two linchpins of his inner conscience. Now, he finally seems to have touched land

(if not the "promised" land). Will he succeed?

The terms and the conditions for this to occur are there. Pannella has always acted as a clear-cut "alternative" to the "regime" (yes, that regime which Ernesto Rossi (4) had foreshadowed and fought against, versus the moderation of his "lay" colleagues from "Il Mondo" (5)...). Many, during those decades, accused him of refusing to take the "opportunities" he had been offered. Remember? He was also accused because of the "preamble" of the Statute, that bitter and unpronounceable document which contained an extraordinary homage to the Law as the certifying source of every society and State. What's going on today? That a group of magistrates realizes (today! why today?) that the interpretation of the Law, even in terms of simple "technique" and banal professional praxis, was, and is meant to be, the one outlined in that preamble they had made fun of...When the honest socialist exponent commits suicide because he realizes the dreadfulness of the condemnation (not the penal one) inflicted on him for having viola

ted the "rule" of the law from his position of ethic responsibility, what else is he doing but reading the burning lines of that preamble?

Therefore, we can say we have reached that point in which "hope beyond hope" can touch the land we had only had a far glimpse of. Today, is that "radical (truly radical) alternative which Pannella outlined, imagined and fancied about in so many unforgettable speeches in the streets and squares of Rome, possible? Is it possible for a true alternative to emerge, rather than a simple alternation (which Pannella would nonetheless know how to judge and experiment, in his all-political pragmatism, in all its positive aspects): with the birth, or the difficult onset, of tomorrow's democratic state, to be valid and exemplary not just for Italy, but for a global society deprived of guidance and imaginary power. His challenge is linked to a spiderweb, thin but possibly very resistant...

This is the challenge, in his terms. Pannella faces a major challenge on this field. And yet, he faces the "insurmountable" barrier of the non-achievement of 30,000 new members. A whim? I don't think so, if the ambition, the very objective proportions of the challenge, are the ones outlined above (I swear, with no trace of triumphalism). But will there be 30,000 people in Italy capable of raising their heads and answering Pannella's request for "charity"?

In other words: is there a possible alternative, lay, federalist, environmentalist leading class in Italy, capable of opening the doors to the new age which is not only desirable, but direly necessary to come out of the tunnel?

(1) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

(2) GALLI DELLA LOGGIA ERNESTO. Historian, university professor, journalist. Of Marxian formation, he then supported liberalism and ran at the elections of 1992 for the "Lista Referendum" ticket.

(3) AMATO GIULIANO. (Turin 1938). Politician, expert in constitutional law. Extraparliamentary by formation, later joined the Socialist Party. Member of Parliament during several legislatures, under-secretary of the Presidency of the Council during the two Craxi governments. Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Treasury during the first Goria government.

(4) ROSSI ERNESTO. (Caserta 1897 - Rome 1967). Italian journalist and politician. Leader of "Giustizia e Libertà", in 1930 he was arrested by the fascist regime and remained in prison or exiled until the end of the war. Author, together with Spinelli, of the "Manifesto di Ventotene", and leader of the European Federalist Movement and of the battle for a united Europe. Among the founders of the Radical Party. Essayist and journalist, from "Il Mondo" he promoted vehement campaigns against clerical interference in the political life, against economic trusts, industrial and agrarian protectionism, private and public concentrations of power, etc. His articles were collected in famous books ("I padroni del vapore", etc). After the dissolution of the Radical Party in 1962, and the consequent split from the editor of "Il Mondo", M.Pannunzio, he founded "L'Astrolabio", whence he continued his polemics. In his last years he joined the "new" radical party, with which in 1967 he launched the "Anticlerical Year".

(5) IL MONDO. Political and cultural weekly magazine, established in Rome by Mario Pannunzio. For seventeen years it was the expression and the symbol of the best lay, liberal, radical and democratic Italian tradition. Most of its journalists participated in the foundation of the radical Party. Ceased publications in 1966, was taken over by Arrigo Benedetti in 1969. Subsequently became an economic magazine.