ABSTRACT: The Radical Party presents itself in national elections for the first time on June 20, 1976 and succeeds by a few hundred votes in winning four seats in the House of Deputies. Marco Pannella tells of the desperate hunt for a loan of 200 million [lire] a few days before the election in the attempt to break through the wall of silence concerning the Radical list of candidates, the night time meeting with Gianni Agnelli and Radical Radio's 19 continuous hours of an open line with its listeners.

Ten days left until the elections. By chance we discover that if we should make it we have the right to a reimbursement of 200 million for campaign expenses. We talk about this with Gianfranco and Paolo. They know my predictions. It is more than probable that we will not make it. If the elections were held tomorrow, the votes would probably be there. But the foreseeable slaughter game has already begun. All we have left is six minutes of television time. We don't have a lira for newspaper advertising, for a few posters, for any other action. We manage to pay out of our own pockets for moving around to the public assemblies, making personal debts. Anyway, the hunger strikes and the clashes with the PCI [Communist Party] are over. The curtain of silence has fallen. Not a word is written or spoken concerning our political objectives, concerning our arguments, on our general projects.

The notes that we sent to the RAI-TV will be wiped out by the combined bombardment of censorship and mystification. If we could only manage to publish even a single half-page ad in all newspapers on the Friday before the election! Certainly we wouldn't reach more than a tenth of the voters, but it would surely be enough to permit us to pull sufficient votes, to get in on the bottom line. Ten days before I had ordered a demographic poll in the city of Milan. The results that arrived six days before the election confirm it: we have 2% of the voters and projecting this percentage on the entire territory we should succeed in getting the necessary 1.6% electoral quotient. But if we lose even just a few votes now, we are done for. There is still almost a week before the election.

The situation is tragi-comic. If we had the money, even just a part of it, which by law ought to be reimbursed within a month of the election, it is a mathematical certainty by our calculations that we can make it. A loan would be enough, even at loan-shark interest. If we can't get it we are almost sure to fail. Within a few hours we will begin turning to everyone, literally everyone imaginable, with growing fear, while we continue with our assemblies all over Italy, with the airplanes on strike, the trains late and our comrades on their last legs by now.

We travel by car at night and trying to keep in touch by telephone is a nightmare. Meanwhile the enthusiasm and support seems to multiply. They don't believe us. They think it is for superstitious reasons when we continue to warn them that we are about to be beaten. Thus arises the other danger: people won't vote for us for fear of wasting their vote or because they think "why bother, at this point they're in".

All the way from Sicily to Milan I pondered the reasons, after thirty years in politics, why it is not possible for us to get not so much as "financing" but just a twenty-day loan. We are willing to do anything, to risk our own money. A chink of hope seems to open. In Milan a group of ex young progressive industrialists, a few Scalfari (1) "Radicals", have turned up after almost twenty years of total and disdainful silence. Not as much as ten thousand lire has been forthcoming from them for civil rights battles, but all of a sudden they find that we are not being very nice to Scalfari.

So now they bring one million in cash around to the Lombardy headquarters. We send the money back (Paolo almost gets a heart attack) with a telegram saying: "Keep it for your butler's bonus or a tip for your servants".

I suddenly thing of something that, however it turns out, will be politically profitable. I try to get ahold of Gianni Agnelli. They tell me he is in Spain. I have no passport, they have been refusing to renew it for years. They must be worried that I too, like Saccucci, will try to escape abroad. I call Cossiga (2) asking him if he can't let me have something, maybe a pass or a 24-hour renewal. He is very courteous. The Rome police chief calls me assuring me of a few day's renewal while waiting to arrange something better. Will the planes be taking off? Years ago the Spanish police refused to admit me. And now? But finally I hear that Agnelli is back in Turin. It is 7 p.m. He tells me that in two days he will be in Rome and we can meet then. I tell him that I only have a few hours to propose something to him. If he can't manage it, never mind. But I must see him at the latest this evening. At 11.30 tomorrow morning I must be in Palermo. I don't know if I will find a plane, but I would go to Fiumicino [

airport] at once and try. There I find some comrades who help me whom I didn't know until yesterday. I manage to get a plane to Genoa, not Turin. Agnelli, kindly but in vain, sends a car to pick me up at Caselle Airport.

I arrive at his home around midnight. The plan was to see him for at most half an hour. Agnelli has gone to bed, but in case I should arrive I am his house guest for the night. Thus we meet at dawn. I explain the situation to him: a twenty-day loan, a bank guarantee, a promissory note, anything he likes. He is embarrassed. He makes a phone call. I guess to whom and I begin to be amused: Agnelli knows very well that he will be advised against this. "Certainly," he tells me, "we'd have to find someone willing to "bet" on you; a gamble, nothing else. You know, in Rome it might be possible..."

"No, sir, it is you I am asking, and there are only a few hours left - a quarter of an hour to be precise, otherwise I will miss my plane."

"Look here, I would have to make the operation appear either on the company records, or on... If it came out, for you too it would..."

"As to that, sir, I forgot to say that if it is done, it must be done publicly. So don't worry. After all, it is not the story of the four hundred million Sogno got with his coups."

At this point he even ceases to be embarrassed. "I am sorry, I really can't help".

"Certainly, sir".

At noon I arrive in Palermo. At 5 p.m. Messina, at 9 p.m. Catania. At 3 a.m. Palermo again where we find a hotel at 5 a.m. and at 6.30 we are to leave for Milan where we arrive at noon where we are to record the final regional appeal, speak in Pavia at 5 p.m., in Lodi at 7, then Monza... I do not even have time to inform Rome that it has all been in vain.

Paolo understands it, and with the ten million tries to arrange for some small ad. Of all the Italian press only the "Messaggero", due to the intervention of the proprietor (how good of him!) and "Il Tempo" accept the ad. Meanwhile Berlinguer (3) attacks us in his television press conference. We are liars and exhibitionists. "Paese Sera" (4) fulfills its task as Cefis's (5), Agnelli's, the "party's" "killer". To the degree indicated in the editorial that we include here - in any case we can make no reply. Arrigo Benedetti signs these Mafia-style machine-gun volleys: he signs them, to be precise, so that he can still, at any price, remain "managing editor". The PCI noticed before we did that truly hundreds of thousands of Communist members were about to vote for us.

The final assemblies are "triumphal". In Milan, the Piazza del Duomo is crowded until midnight with people who are moved and enthusiastic. I tell them: "We won't make it". I explain why. They don't believe me. It is impossible. No one else has filled up the square like this. And it is no longer mere curiousity. A month of campaigning has satisfied that. Here there are voters, and decisive voters.

The results show I was right. In Milan we haven't made it. I go back to Rome. There is nothing left for me to do by now than sit for 19 or more continuous hours at Radical Radio. I treat myself to a walk for the first time in months, after the hunger strikes, the assemblies, the meetings, the sleepless nights and the almost delirious days, even if both were so filled with life, love, dialogue, battles won. I go on foot from the party headquarters to the radio studios in Monteverde Vecchio. I cross Piazza Navona, Via Giulia, the Tiber, with a little detour past Regina Coeli then up Via Garibaldi, Porta San Pancrazio. It is a terse, warm, barely spring-like sunset. Many people stop me, tell me: "It will be all right". Then those incredible thirty hours of non-stop dialogue, from the radio, the telephones, that tide of friendship, understanding, mutual growth, new and old comrades, nights of insomnia for whole families reunited after who knows how long, of voice from beds, of emotional trust and discovery

of themselves, the voices of the blind before all others, of the blind of all kinds, which we all are always and don't know it. We haven't made it, comrades, friends, but we still have til midnight ahead of us, and the remains of the dawn, and one hour more.

We go on like this: in any case, at this point, it will have gone well for us, even if the party goes down, the party which has only just been discovered, felt, loved.

Instead, because we have been able to see things together, see things courageously, clearly that is, because we have been able not to lie to ourselves, because we have not abandoned the hope regained in the importance of each of us, perhaps only at 1 or 2 a.m. on Monday, June 21, we have made it.

Thanks to three hundred of us, three hundred out of 40 million; for three hundred penciled crosses - less than what they do for a "naval battle" [a game, ed.] - we have saved four hundred thousand votes, four hundred thousand hopes. We have not allowed a single vote to be wasted. We have been happy and we will be so again on other occasions together with many other happy and freer people. Not bad, is it Mr. Agnelli?

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Eugenio Scalfari (1924) - Journalist and managing editor of the weekly "L'Espresso" as well as founder and editor of the popular Rome daily "La Reppublica".

2) Francesco Cossiga (1928) - DC leader, presently President of the Republic and at the time Minister of the Interior.

3) Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984) - At the time Secretary of the Communist Party.

4) "Paese Sera" - A communist daily.

5) Eugenio Cefis (1921) - At the time president of the ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi); later president of the chemical giant Montedison, both of them state-owned industries.