By Alfonso Madeo

ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella is the nation's number one leader of protests, marches, sit-ins, parades, defiant actions, polemics and accusations - For conscientious objection, a hunger strike "up to the last caffeelatte" - Civil commitment on the razor's edge, without mass organisations and without divine intervention - A mission under the sign of "the long march of the institutions" - "With imagination one can attain incredible political results".

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, November 1972)

Rome, November

"The battle for winning the right to conscientious objection costs Radical Party militants 1300 days of hunger striking. By the end, of course, the bill will be stiffer. Parliament has agreed to set a limit to the debate. But the outcome is what counts. A question mark. The Radicals are ready to make a reply with more collective hunger strikes. This time to the bitter end: "up to the last caffelatte". They are counting on mobilising public opinion and blocking the possibility of compromises among the parties.

At the moment 140 men called up for military service are locked up in military prisons for being declared conscientious objectors. Two are at large: Roberto Cicciomessere and Alberto Gardin, Radical Party secretaries. It is estimated that every year 4,000 soldiers are tried for disobedience. However, it is not on the basis of quantity that the importance of the question raised by the Radicals rests. Quite rightly they put the accent on the civil value of the reform. And they communicate that the recent international appeal on the aims of the hunger strike brought the support of important figures of different political and religious tendencies, from Nenni [Pietro, Socialist leader, ed.] to Cardinal Lercaro, from Silone to Montale [Ignazio Silone, writer and Eugenio Montale., poet, ed.] From Ginzburg [Natalia, writer, ed.] to the theologian Balducci and the president of the Confederation of Italian Evangelical Churches, Mario Sbaffi. Three Nobel Prize winners appear on the list: Heinrich Boell (literature

), Francois Jacob (medicine), and Alfred Kastler (physics)."

For The Minorities

"You immediately notice when you have set hands on a just cause: people write and telephone; there is no need to go begging for the signatures of the famous", says Marco Pannella, the guiding light of Radical dissent and the number one national leader in protests, marches, sit-ins, parades, defiant acts, polemics, accusations, and hunger strikes. In the battle for the rights of conscientious objectors, together with Gardin, he exceeded all reasonable limits of prudence: 39 consecutive days of hunger striking. He came out of it with internal damage that the doctor considers worrisome. Pannella doesn't like to talk about it ("I am against the ethics of sacrifice, I prefer the rhetoric of happiness"). But in Via Torre Argentina everyone knows that he is soon going to have to enter a clinic for a check-up and treatment.

Here in this dusty building in Via Torre Argentina, on the second floor without an elevator, are the general headquarters of the Radicals: rooms and corridors crammed with posters and newspapers, hordes of young militants, a port in a storm used by all the religious, cultural, political and social minorities, the fortress of lay non-violence which proposes "the long march of the institutions" in the attempt to resolve their contradictions and make up for their injustices. Here, full time, Marco Pannella invents issues to be fought for, works out ways of creating problems for the parties, hatches plots against the holders of established political power, studies "peaceful aggressions" against intellectual conformity, launches appeals, writes articles, sets up polemical campaigns. Worn out from hunger strikes and in bad health, he possess a miraculous vitality. The vitality of one who believes in what he lives for, he explains with a broad, jovial smile."

"I Am Not A Politician"

"If a personage like him didn't exist", say his friends, "you would have to invent him". The Communists look on him with diffidence, the Catholics keep a troubled eye on him, the Fascists despise him, the extra-parliamentary left discuss him angrily, the "qualunquisti" (1) think he is a ball breaker, and the right-thinking bourgeoisie treat him as if he were a student. Who is Pannella?

"I am not a politician. I consider myself a sociologist of politics". At this point it would be legitimate to think of him as being on the sidelines, locate him in an ambiguous role. Then he suddenly bursts out with: "I have always believed in politics and never in culture". At such a moment one begins to suspect that it is a paradoxical game in which Pannella is trying to purify conventional language of its most worn-out and abused meanings. One hears him, for example, profess his faith in peripatetic culture "because it is popular culture". It is his obsessive idea, the recurring discourse of his arguments: to live in the streets as the only free place left, give recognition to all the affairs of the people, to break the schemes of the bourgeoisie and the Leninists to reacquire freedom.

It is not easy to keep up with him, keep up with this intellectual who makes of the Radical dissent from the ambiguities of the system a reason for living and a political "mission" within the system itself. He seems to navigate in a sea of contradictions and ingenuous attitudes. But one the contrary, behind the aggressive taste for provocation, his reasonings develop coherently, lucidly and rigorously. "One must have the courage to utter commonplaces in order to affirm once again that the class of political leaders has lost touch with the real country. With all of its problems the country has outdistanced its democratic representatives. The latter have lost their sensitivity to the problems of the people. We now launch our challenge precisely on the terrain of these problems. Our new interlocutors must be sought in a direct and constant dialogue with the people, by-passing the institutional barriers of professional politics and the schematics of classist contrapositions".

If the Jacobin-romantic vocation and lay-moralist component can constitute a subject for interminable discussion for an analysis of the Radicals' actions in the current situation, there should be no doubts about the coherence and commitment Pannella brings to identifying the problems and the way of dealing with them on the level of national conscience. His name is connected with a series of sensational civil battles. At the most, this explains his identification with the affairs of the party in Via Torre Argentina. It is the destiny of a born leader.

"When we maintain the need of different ways of practising politics, we also think of the new techniques of dissent": the novelty offered to the Italian who is indifferent to sit-ins, for example. "The powerful laughed in our faces at first", Marco Pannella recalls, "then it turned into a bitter laugh because people began to be curious and to help us". An occasion for awakening and stimulating the people's imagination ,the discovery of a new possibility of communication. Pannella says: "with imagination you can achieve incredible results in politics". The battle for divorce, he adds, must begin with the initial success of the spirit of the placards carried around during the August holiday in a deserted Piazza Navona. Photographers on the hunt for unusual pictures came running and so the pro-divorce slogans ended up in all the newspapers. If the Radicals had wanted to pay to have them published, they wouldn't have had the means: the party's budget does not exceed thirty million [lire] a year. On the ot

her hand it is open to public scrutiny item by item.

Now the Radicals are in favour of the referendum to abrogate [the divorce law, ed.], not because they have been converted to the indissolubility of marriage, for heaven's sake, they do not even dream of it. "It's because we are sure of winning it", Pannella explains, "on the basis of two elements. Divorce has become an Italian custom without provoking the cataclysm of the apocalyptic warnings. The second element arises from the first and confirms it. A Doxa [a polling service, ed.] poll gives us a nine point advantage over the anti-divorce forces. Do they want a confrontation? It will measure the drop in clerical influence in Italian society."

The "no's" to indisolubility were travelling companions to the no against the obligatory "foglio di via" (2) for any long-haired youths, the no to the Concordat (3), the no to the incongruities of the laws on consumption and use of narcotics, and the no to the limitations of freedom of the press through the obligation of having a professional responsible manager (4). At the same time there occurs the first dissent of delegates to the Milan psychiatric congress (on the problem of aid to minorities) and the beginning of the judicial year in Rome (the problem of the functioning of justice). There were seven anti-militarist marches before the hunger strike for conscientious objectors".

A Troublesome Man

"So, by putting his name on the mast-heads of unauthorised newspapers and persecuted by legal actions, by holding marches, hunger strikes, participating in dissent, making accusations and protests, Marco Pannella found himself involved in a series of penal actions. Another personal record: twelve total acquittals, thirty one trials in progress plus a slew of others. A civil commitment running on the razor's edge, without a mass political organisation to back him up and without any patron saints, in a country full of cunning types ready to grasp any advantage.

Poor as a church mouse, Pannella lives in the most chaotic part of central Rome. His life is made up of books and politics. Little cinema and very little theatre. Many friends and very many enemies. He is not at all bothered by the accusation of always keeping his nose to the grindstone. In the evening one can more readily find him in a cheap trattoria than a high society salon. When the season changes he goes around in borrowed clothes. He has the air of an itinerant preacher. This is Pannella, the trouble-maker of Italian public life.

His conviction that the party ideologies and the ideology of power are in an irreversible crisis makes him repeat at every step: "One must go ahead with projects for understanding and resolving the problems of the people." This is the origin of Radical strategy. Even before recovering from the disastrous effects of his last record hunger strike, therefore, Pannella prepares the programme of civil struggles to be unleashed on the somnolent Italian society. What is it all about? "Non-violence must push ahead, act on the present regime without a moment's rest. We will be able to collect 700,000 notarised signatures. We will make each one sign more than one referendum petition. That's it. By the end of 1975 we figure on being able to make the regime confront six or seven referendums at the same time on issues vital to the country. The referendum is our non-violent weapon. We will make systematic use of it to change the face of the system." Isn't it possible that the Italians will become irritated and chos

e laziness? "We have never annoyed the Italians. When we organise a parade we march on the sidewalks so as not to disturb the automobile traffic. That is without considering that the people have reached a high level of political conscience with regard to concrete problems", Marco Pannella concludes. -----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Qualunquisti - Believers in qualunquismo, a common expression defining an attitude of diffidence towards political parties and even the party system as such.

2) This was a police measure widely used ordering people who were living in but not official residents of Italian cities to return to their home towns. Thus it was related to the forced residence in the places of their birth used for notorious Mafia figures.

3) The Lateran Pact giving the Catholic church special privileges.

4) A manager who took responsibility for anything published that might be legally actionable, but who otherwise did not participate in the production of the publication.