ABSTRACT: In the midst of the collection of signatures for the abortion referendum, the government attempts to block the possibility of this during the municipal and regional elections by prohibiting collection points in the streets and not allowing the registrars to leave the court houses. The Republican Oronzo

Reale holds the Justice Ministry. In the pages of the weekly "L'Espresso", Marco Pannella denounces these manoeuvres and opens a violent dispute with the Italian Republican Party (PRI) and the daily paper "La Stampa".

("L'Espresso" - May 1975 from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980 - Gammalibri publishers, January 1982)

The ignoble motion passed by the PRI's National Council to justify the violent blow against the referendum and the Constitution struck by the Ministry of the Interior is well paired with the exalted apology for Fanfani's project to worsen the Fascist public order norms. Randolfo Pacciardi can finally feel easy: through the work of Oronzo Reale and Oscar Mamḿ, he has achieved the status of the PRI's guiding spirit. Ugo La Malfa who speaks out loud his inner torment mistakes both the address and the addressees when he laments and curses the ideological "hatred" that the younger generations seem to have for the regime and its hypocritical standard bearers of democracy. In view of the spectacle that his party is making of itself, he would do better, like Saragat (1), to reprove once again a cynical and cheating fate (if one prefers not to recognise one's own errors) for having given him unworthy successors. It has already happened in Italian history that the Republicans have had to pay a heavy bill for col

laborating with Fascism. This is what is now happening again. As before, it is the collaborators who lay down the law, who are honoured by news of their activities, of their existence. The others, the representatives of the Republican left, are not to exist or to be brought to the attention of the public. In the press not a line, in fact, of the opposition made in the National Council by De Cataldo, by Gangi, by Mazzotti, by Lombardi; not a hint of the circumstances of the vote, of the refusal to give the floor to the Republican Youth Federation's representatives, which yet is so "normalised" at its top levels, or to the commitments of the young Roman Republicans.

Hence, considering the context in which it necessarily must be inserted, the severe and difficult initiative of Visentini declines from a demonstration of courage and sense of statesmanship to an obligatory component of which on the whole is authoritarian, corrupt, classist, and subservient to Fanfani's designs. The poor "Social Democrats", the poor Italian "Liberals"! By now they have spent a lifetime using and betraying their ideological heritage in order to compete against the DC for some electoral fringe on the right or the far left, and now there comes along a small army of ministers, under-secretaries, group presidents and vice-presidents, journalists more or less belonging to the camps of Cefis or Montanelli, all of them of the PRI, and in a few weeks they brilliantly and deservedly become candidates for leading this operation. In Rome, in Sicily, and even more in Romagna, Republican friends tell us that they want to resign, that they are already resigning. I think they are making a mistake: t

hey should rather continue to fight. The facts will prove them right, the PRI will not be able for long to keep on betraying itself without becoming aware that it is on the road to suicide.

These hard polemics do not please the directors of "La Stampa" (see the editorial of Sunday, the fourth). According to them we are responsible for an indiscriminate "assault on the DC", "sophomoric and full of hot air"; democratic exaltation has gone to our heads. We would be exaggerating, we would be falsifying when we denounce the fact that "the DC is openly resorting to the destruction of the institutions".

In replying to them let us keep to the specific theme of this article: the referendum on abortion. In order to strike it down, the government commits an act of manifest violence against the Constitution. The humanity of the jurists who have so far spoken out on it, confirms this. It is publicly recognised by authoritative Christian Democrats of the Dorotean (2) faction, and even by jurists of the far right despite their being furiously hostile to the referendum and to our position on abortion.

In Trieste, Pisa, Florence in these very hours the next phase of the operation is going into effect: they are prohibiting tables for the collection of signatures, the distribution of flyers, posters on the walls, all with the excuse of the election campaign. Gui abrogates the municipal secretaries, Reale the court registrars. The prefects and mayors abrogate all other possibilities for the public collection of signatures. We regularly denounce these acts in the courts, to the President of the Republic, the guarantor of the clandestine Constitution. THere are calls for rebellion, for violence. We are not willing to pay this ransom. We do not want to resemble our enemies, not even in order to defend our constitutional rights, which their own laws confer on us.

"La Stampa", pontificating again in "defense of democracy", is by now obliged to do without any form of collaboration with its own authoritative jurists. They too have become "radicals"! For Giovanni Conso to be able to speak his mind he must participate in an external debate if he wants to say a word in the local Turin news section against the Reale project. In truth, there are not many Giovanni Bovios any more. And the good Mr. Ottone has now taken up the defense as a zealot for Fanfani in the same way as poor Angiolillo did previously in Rome. When the hour for the vote nears, that of "democratic" recreation ends - as do all others. A whistle and everyone obediently returns to his squalid regime task. Now then, "La Stampa" did not waste even one line on condemning even blandly the violent operation going on against the referendum, in defense of mass clandestine abortion and the annulment of a constitutional right and duty.

So I shall again say to Carlo Casalegno and Arrigo Levi and to their "president" Gianni Agnelli, that they are out of their minds, that they do not understand what a load of violence destruction and anti-democracy there is in the abuses and obtuse arrogance of power. Out of their minds, of course, if we must take them for the democrats and liberals they love to pose as and call themselves. Because if it were true that certain family and business traditions of Fiat and its employees are once again beginning to prevail over the will and presumptuous ambitions of a more or less "Giscardian" or "Social Democratic" type, then all of that would be unexceptionable. But then, good sirs, please be so kind as not to break our balls with your "civil" and "moderate" complaints. Go to the cash desk, revert to censorship, receive your market price, a senatorial toga for the one, a rise in salary for the others, and leave us to our folly.

But do not forget that this madness of ours is what made possible May 13, 1974 (3) and then drove mad even such a one as Ugo La Malfa to the point of making him write that it would take not one but a "thousand other" referendums to save Italy.

We have reached 180,000 signatures. Damned few in the face of the offensive they are unleashing and the Fascist tactics of the government. Friends, readers of "L'Espresso", and still more "militant revolutionaries" of the AO, PDUP, LC (4) etc. - where are you all?

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Giuseppe Saragat (1898 - 1988) A Socialist leader and later

head of the Social Democratic Party.

2) A Christian Democratic faction so called because it held its

first meeting in the convent of St. Dorotea in Rome in 1959.

3) The date of the victorious pro-divorce referendum.

4) Three far-left wing parties:

AO - Autonmia Operaia or Workers Autonomy

PDUP - Partito di Unità Proletaria or Proletarian Unity

Party