ABSTRACT: The XXVth Congress (Extraordinary) is held only a few weeks after the vote on the referendums called by the Radical Party. The "no's" prevailed to a large degree on the four referendums admitted by the Constitutional Court: 88.4% against removing all penalties for abortion; 85% against the abrogation of the special powers of the police; 82.5% against abolishing licenses to bear arms; 77.4% against the abolition of life in prison. On the one hand the motion of the Congress takes note that the referendum project as it was conceived at the beginning of the 70's can be considered definitely closed. On the other hand, the motion commits the party to gather information and evaluations for promoting adequate actions against death by starvation. From this moment the fight against hunger officially becomes the central objective of the party.

("The Battles, the Victories and the Proposals of the Radicals as Seen in their Congressional Documents and Statute" - November 1985 - edited by Maurizio Griffo - Pamphlet published by the the Radical Party Treasury)

GENERAL MOTION

The XXVth Congress Extraordinary) of the Radical Party

takes note that the referendum project, proposed and actuated at the Turin Congress of November 1972, over which there were dramatic clashes and confrontations with the regime, has been clearly fulfilled with the holding of the referendum of May 17, and has had an enormously positive influence on the life of the country with the divorce referendum of May 12, 1974, with those in 1978 regarding public financing of political parties and the Reale Law (a repressive anti-terrorist law, ed.), with the last referendum clash of this past year as well as with the bearing of the referendum requests on the activity of the Parliament and the legislation of these last years;

confirms its own commitment to protect and strengthen the referendum as an ordinary tool of the country's political and institutional life;

claims for the Radical Party to have united with the "yes" of the Radical referendums from 3 million 600 thousand to 5 million citizens on rigorous leftist and alternative choices and to have obliged the clergy, the left and the laity to face a call to the divorce referendum with the test of the abortion referendum;

notes that this conclusive defeat of the clergy deprives of any legitimacy the policy of organic class collaboration and of compromise that has for thirty years inspired the choices of the left-wing and of the so-called lay parties. For this reason too, the alternative program of contents and values is the only one that can legitimately be proposed by whoever wants to follow a truly lay, Socialist and libertarian political line;

reveals the political and moral impossibility of reproposing in these conditions the revision of the Lateran Pact and the need of acquiring for the citizens and the government, as well as for the believers and the Church themselves, a radically different relationship founded on the guarantees of liberty and the rules of a State governed by law;

verifies that a significant part of the commitments assumed by the motion approved by the ordinary November Congress have thus been fulfilled. In consequence, the Radical Party, being free of these commitments, can now confront those of the statutory and thus political re-founding of the party as well as that of the fight against death by starvation in the world that has up to now been entrusted to individual radicals;

gives a mandate to the statutory organs to set in motion all the offices and the initiatives for gathering and working out the information - including the work of the ordinary Congress in November - necessary to the re-founding of the party; to acquire as soon as possible the necessary facts to allow the party to launch adequate actions for guaranteeing that a relevant number of the world's women, men and children will be saved from death by starvation who are now candidates for a certain death imposed by the injustice and exploitation of the world's northern hemisphere to the detriment of the southern one.