ABSTRACT: The left is co-responsible for the election of the Conservative Henry Plumb as President of the European Parliament. Instead of the sterile and unproductive contraposition between "left" and "right", a federalist candidate should have been selected to oppose the Thatcher-lining Plumb. The 61 deputies that voted for Marco Pannella are the hard-core federalists needed to continue the struggle. The urgent need for the International Gandhian Party to unify Europe politically.

(STAMPA SERA, January 26, 1987)

The election of Thatcher-lining Sir Henry Plumb is the result of an "iron pact" - respected with Stalinist discipline by the Italian and European DC and the Le Pen and Almirante right wing - along with the British Conservatives to which have given way the PLI [Partito Liberale Italiano] and a part of the PRI [Partito Repubblicano Italiano] as well as other right and centre European groups.

Contributing to this result were the Social Democrats, Socialists and Communists who, to the very end, stubbornly insisted, against all political and numerical logic, on forcing a clash between the "right" and the "left", refusing to follow our federalist initiative that had deeply injured the right-wing candidate, thanks to the support of the Italian and European laity; and this despite the positive interest of Claudio Martelli [PSI] and Lionel Jospin and the unexpected success of the 61 votes cast for me on the first ballot.

The emblem of this left is neither the rose nor the carnation [the PSI symbol, ed.], but the chrysanthemum [in Italy the flower reserved for funerals, ed.]: they are always united at the funerals that they provoke when they do not mutually disown each other, one and all.

Three more Christian Democratic or lay deputies would have been enough in the end to elect the least anti-federalist of the candidates and beat the one of the European status quo, of anarchist impotence and of immobility.

At least twenty deputies of the "right" or the "centre", when the count was in, followed our direction and understood that the election of the Socialist Baron - the candidate of a left that made him bite the dust so that he would stay down on the ground - would at that point have been a victory for "us" coherent and sincere European federalists. A coherence and sincerity that induced us anti-clerical and anti-avellinesi (1) Radicals to officially back the Christian Democrat Pfimlin or the Liberal Simone Veil of the Giscard faction. Unfortunately those twenty colleagues were not enough by a hair's breadth and due to others' lack of firmness.

This event mirrored what happened in Rome and Brussels with the Craxi-Andreotti-Spadolini "governments" and the Delors one respectively. I am well aware that Craxi received Delors in the proper fashion the other day, reminding him that the Brussels Commission is in arrears even with respect to the instructions of the chiefs-of-state and government "summit", the seat of the Community's "re-nationalisation". I also know that in Brussels several commissars (ministers) near to Carlo Ripa di Meana are trying to modify this policy. But in Rome and Brussels everything deteriorates all the same.

We will keep up the fight in Parliament with the hard core of deputies that wanted, were ready to allow, and supported my federalist candidacy (in the absence, alas!, of others) and its success. But it is necessary at once that in place of the Party International there should be an international party to fight in the style of Gandhi, the grass roots as well as the institutions, to unify Europe as India was unified. The Radical Congress that will be held in Rome on February 26 will have this as its first task, if it knows how to accept its character of a "second party" that is able to look far ahead and fight for what is in the heart of the people and is historically necessary as did Coloroni, Rossi and Spinelli for half a century.

-----TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Avellinesi - The DC of the town of Avellino belonging to the De Mita faction.