ABSTRACT: The Radical Party as Marco Pannella tells of it according to the turning points in its history and the people he loved. Vittorini (1): "You are the only Copernicans among our Ptolemaic politicians"; Pasolini (2): How the story of the "trial" (3) was born; Rossi, Sciascia, (4) Spinelli (5), Terracini, Gullo, Vidali...

The Radical Party from civil disobedience to a "new obedience". De Benedetti and Scalfaro are thinking of turning the Republic over to technocrats and are thus destabilising elements.

(FINE SECOLO, November 2/3, 1985)

One has to find an idea for speaking of the Radicals at the congress. The idea is to interview Marco Pannella. "Go on", you will say. One moment please, there may be things which Pannella has not yet said, and others which you haven't yet heard. In what follows he has decided to claim his ancestors, recent and remote, without disdaining to pass through the needle's eye of recent events and political affairs. He didn't speak of the congress. Another 24 hours and you will know how it went. From the other papers.

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You decide to devote an issue of "Fine Secolo" to the Radicals and their congress. You look for an original idea. Then you go to interview Pannella. It's up to him to avoid repeating himself.

I meet him at Montecitorio [the seat of the Chamber of Deputies, ed.] with the government on vacation and on a Saturday morning. The building is deserted and Pannella stands there with the impatient nonchalance of the proprietor of an ancestral home obliged to put up with a season of gross or clumsy tenants and to see the furnishings go to ruin or the most sacred treasures put to the most improper uses.

Is it not surprising that Pannella, who got into Parliament so late, immediately began to manage laws and regulations so masterfully? As he leads me through the building, Pannella stops to look at the gallery of portraits of the speakers of the Chamber of Deputies whose faces and names are for the most part unknown to me, and he tells me that he has committed most of them to memory. In his home, he relates, manuscripts of figures from the Risorgimento were jealously guarded and he as a boy deciphered them with passion. I feel that I am beginning to receive revelations concerning the education of a master of procedure.

The visit includes the offices and the barber shop, a recent and intrepid example of art deco in the funereal style. Pannella tells me how much it cost. A lot. Then we pass by the mail boxes, each one with the name of the person it belongs to. The keys are in most of the locks, and Pannella tells me with satisfaction that until a few years ago every one took his key with him - until he left his in the lock and little by little the others did so too. An injection of trust.

The end of the guided tour. The conversation begins. Our insert on Pasolini (1) recently came out and it is inevitable to begin with him. I tell Pannella that I am going to publish Pasolini's speech to the Radical Party Congress in Florence ten years ago, which is kind of his testament. It is high time, he tells me, to tell about the relationship with the Radicals of men like Pasolini or Vittorini (2).

Vittorini

How many people today know that Vittorini was president of the party? In March 1965 I asked Vittorini: "There are only 150 of us in all, we don't count for anything, they don't even send reporters to our manifestations. Why do you accept?" When one keeps silent about this one cuts something from our stature and from Vittorini's too. In 1968, I think it was, intellectuals like Di Carlo, Carocci and Einaudi tried to mount an election battle in Milan with independent leftists, and Vittorini sent me a telegram: "I am informing you that the condition for my candidacy is being identified as a Radical or an independent Radical". That was enough to bury the operation.

There was a period in which he made himself scarce. I sent him a letter of protest and received the reply: "I have become aware of how old I am getting, because a short time ago I would have replied with 80 or 100 pages".

Pasolini

This is how it was with Pasolini: A good third of the "Lettere luterane" are addressed to Radicals. Especially in the last three or four years [of his life, ed.], Pasolini sent us humanly and politically formidable signals. According to De Mauro, Pasolini never used the expression "I love you". But Pasolini wrote in the "Corriere" [the Milan daily, ed.] "Pannella knows how much I love him". He was desperate while we were full of hope. Nothing is worse than the efforts of the "left" to demonstrate the plot against Pasolini, the need to kill his true image in order to ennoble his life and death. They remembered that in the ten pages he was supposed to read to us in November 1975 he said he was going to vote PCI [Communist Party]. He was with us, he would have been one of our candidates before Sciascia was. Ten years have past and it is right to give him his due and us our due. There was that front page article in the "Corriere" in 1974 in which, at a certain point, he wrote: "for the sake of honesty, I an

nounce that from this point on the article is going to become, even in form, a pamphlet", and he concluded by giving the address and other useful information for contacting us.

Now it is possible to remember all of this. Up until a short time ago it would have meant, in the general opinion, giving a measure of violence, of unworthiness, to him, to Ernesto Rossi, to Vittorini. Today this is no longer the case. Do you know how Pasolini's idea of the trial was born? It was the Summer of '74, he was confused by the behaviour of the press and others towards us. He suffered from it, suffered anxiety. At the end of August, Michele Tito, assistant managing editor of the "Corriere", published a meagre article of mine in which I said that the polls gave us 3% of the vote. It was a long article that had been cut, but it managed to say that the historical realisation of our action would not derive from the trial, a penal trial against all those holding power. A month later Pasolini, returning from abroad, phones me to ask how I am - he had left me in the midst of a hunger strike of the most rigid kind - and I call his attention to the drastically cut article in the "Corriere". The next da

y he telephones me very upset and asks me what happened after that proposal. He is scandalized by the silence with which it was received and says that at least in the Fascist period there was invective, polemics. I say to him: "You try, you are not reducible to an organisation, you'll see what hell will be raised". It was like a gamble that with him it would work. And he wrote those things with which we are now familiar.

Or else the story of Fascism-anti-Fascism. Pasolini was struck in reading my preface to Valcarenghi's book and wrote that this was the manifesto of Radicalism that had been lacking. And Pasolini was not exaggerated, excessive, paradoxically perhaps, but very moderate especially when he wrote as a critic. And he called that preface - you remember, it was the one in which I wrote about Parri-Sofri anti-Fascist line - the Radical Manifesto. Immediately afterwards he wrote the article in which he imagined himself as the teacher of a Neapolitan "scugnizzo" (street urchin, ed.) explaining to him for the first time the relation between Fascism and anti-Fascism, and he quoted me in a footnote. And to quote me in a serious piece was a real piece of whimsy because in the world of the learned I do not exist. I remember that I suggested to him that when he said post-Fascist anti-Fascism was the heir of Fascism he ought to add "and not of anti-Fascism" because otherwise he would be exposing himself to a misunderst

anding and to being lynched.

In 1964 we turned ourselves inside out to bring out "Agenzia Radicale" - you'll remember it, a twenty-page daily in 800 mimeographed copies, and the kids from the local [coffee] bars who came to help us with the lay-out. Well then, one day I open "Il Tempo" - the weekly - and I find an article by Pasolini saying that he has been out of Italy more and more often recently and even when he comes back he feels like a stranger, and would feel even more like one "if it weren't for this little sheet".

It was a continuous dialogue. I think of "conscientious affirmation" - you know that we say affirmation and not objection. Pasolini in this regard wrote about a prison guard who violated the rules by allowing a convict to be with his girl friend and who then escaped. The guard committed suicide. Pasolini wrote that his death was an affirmation of humanity against blind obedience, a proposal for life (one sees that the poem about Valle Giulia was not extemporaneous), and he concluded: "So you see, my dear Pannella, one must mobilise in favour of 'yes' and not 'no', and he didn't remember that two years earlier we were the ones to say 'no to no'".

I remember certain trials. My great regret is that I didn't become a lawyer - or rather, I have two great regrets, the other being that I do not have a terrace. They are, you see, not such unattainable ambitions. In fact, tomorrow morning perhaps, thanks to the Belgian law, I may be able to defend a young conscientious objector in court. I have to feel prepared, I am a swot, I don't believe in a political defense. In short, I remember the eve of a hearing in Turin. Pasolini, you, "and others" were accused. I remember Pier Paolo's terror, a truly Kafkaesque anguish, he couldn't decide whether to come and finally he stayed in Rome. I wrote to the court that the accusation was an offence to the judiciary and that I would be in court to hand out leaflets of my letter, but insubordinate.

The trial opens and when my name is called the presiding judge says "yes, yes, we know where he is" and after less than an

hour he sends everything back to the public prosecutor on the pretext of a procedural matter but in fact throwing the case out of court. For this reason to I do not agree when one speaks indiscriminately of the "leaden years" [a common expression referring to the period of terrorism, ed.]. There were other possibilities even then, and one could find an unknown presiding judge like that one. And at the same time, those who take up Pasolini's posthumous defense, denying that he was the way he was - I have warned them that if I too should come to a "bad end" that they should not go looking for the hundred charges and trials against me.

THE LAST TEN MONTHS

"There is a brief pause. I go to look out the window high above the square. He may not have a terrace but from here the view is splendid with the receding profiles of cupolas and, beautiful, the cusp of S. Ivo alla Sapienza with in the far distance, directly ahead, the magnificent tubular structure of the gasometer at the foot of which is our editorial office - out of the way in this aspect too. Pannella returns and we approach the questions of current events."

Something has really happened, it is true that Italy has surpassed its provisional exercises, but they don't even believe in their own results, considering them marginal. Thus Bettino [Craxi, PSI leader, ed.] risks being measured against Spadolini [Giovanni, PRI leader, ed.]. But Spadolini it turn has to hold on to it, not reduce it to a pulp as Reagan has already done. Andreotti, a foreign minister who, apart from his childhood inheritance from Evangelisti, has a heart that beats for people like Sindona and Caltagirone at home and abroad Hassad (not even Arafat who is too romantic) and the Soviets. He likes them, they are people of whom nothing is known, like Sindona whose non-existence as a private person guarantees him the integrity of Roman baroque. Including Satan, who is also baroque, who is his model. Politics as the secular arm is too the schizophrenia of God and the morning mass.

Do you know who is a person you ought to meet, without ulterior motives, the way one goes to the Uffizi [art gallery in Florence, ed.]? It's Capt. Sankarà, the dictator of Burkina Fasu, the Upper Volta, a forty-year-old beset by tragedy, a person who has named his two sons Philippe and Auguste - they may soon be orphans - and at the UN quotes Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis or Victor Hugo. He has a mixed French and Scolopio (6) culture. He has a serious look, is good, is no Savanarola but mild and also ingenuous. Burkina Fasu means "the country of the just men". So I asked him: "What about the unjust, the diverse? Will we resuscitate Aryans and Jews as the just and the unjust?" And yet he has a great passion for justice. He makes his ministers do gymnastics as Starace did. But there are also his school chums. If one day after having perpetrated a massacre, he is not killed and is in jail, I will send him Voltaire or some letters of John XXIII, the first to make the peasants acquainted with Voltaire.

Altiero Spinelli

In the end I once again met up with the people with whom I had started out, the old elephants I had loved and who loved me up to the end: Ernesto Rossi, Terracini, Fausto Gullo, Fidali. And, very much alive, Altiero Spinelli - have you read his wonderful book? Altiero wanted to send it to Franceschini in prison after having seen the interview with [Enzo] Biagi.

These are the months in which the birth of Europe can become irreversible or else it can be buried. Our newspapers are not even aware of this. Not only them. The Republicans did not have to work very hard to realise that if the European policy is derailed, the Middle Eastern one will be too. No one said how, against the governments, the European Parliament voted for Spinelli again. Even the English Conservatives, who with all their hauteur and insularity are serious conservatives, are working for federalism. The question is simple: whether to go on with the old treaties or to launch a new treaty that provides for the European Union (of the republics etc., one might add if it weren't for the monarchies - we wanted to call them the United States of Europe). One hour previous to the European vote our Chamber approved a motion which committed us to ratifying it. It was quite extraordinary. I announced in the chamber, before it happened, the satisfaction of eleven non-voting deputies who had seen an almost u

nanimous approval of the imperative mandate to actuate the project that we were on the verge of approving here too. The Parliament voted and ratified blindly a European deliberation that was still to take place!

At the beginning of his six-month term, January - July, in the presidency, the government seemed to go ahead, Craxi, and above all Ruggero, the secretary general of the Farnesina [Italian Foreign Ministry, ed.], one who knew the problem, had been to Brussels, no light weight. Then things got bogged down and the countries went in the direction of a simple reform of the existing treaties. In Milan in July, a vote was passed that the reform had, in any case, to be based on the text of the European Parliament and that an inter-governmental conference should propose it within three months to the national parliaments. In point of fact, instead of giving authority to the conference they delegated it to diplomatic channels, preferring once again the logic of events to the logic of mankind.

The other day, the European Parliament passed a motion deploring the betrayal of the mandate. In Italy no one knew anything about it, they were all worrying about Abbas. So then it is now time to go on to the question of non-violence for the European Federation.

("I pause for a moment to submit this passage to the attention of those who are asking what the next aims of the Radicals are").

But it was Altiero whom I wanted to talk about with his face of a patriarch, his loves, his children, his adamant character - and he was one of the very few truly timid people: think of the chastity of his book and its discretion, all the stronger because unnoticed, undeclared. For the first time since 1948 when he offered me the leadership of the Youth for European Federation and I did not accept, for the first time he now tells me with a shade of embarrassment: "Marco, I have only a little more time left, and so who is going to do it if you don't?"

At a distance of forty years I can still see that strong thread of the Thirties unwinding, composed of innocence, of intransigent and anti-sectarian laicism. I also see the whole repertory of accusations, those which the PCI ignobly directed at the Rossellis: exhibitionists, self-pitiers, activists, vitalists, puppets of the secret services more dangerous than the Fascists... I think of the civic education texts that have never mentioned the names of Mario Ferrara or Nicolò Carandini, of Arrigo Cajumi, of Mario Paggi, of Achille Battaglia and just as many other names that I never tire of citing in the Chamber for future memory in the hope that one day someone will come browsing and find them. This was a generation that believed in the force of culture, ready to be present at court - but also to go to jail - and to whom power was alien, pertaining to a sovereign or a government.

They knew they could count on their personal strength and that they were different. Their sons chose to mortify ideas and people in exchange for power, for power over people. Their sons stand in relation to their fathers as the second anti-Fascism does to the first. De Ruggiero, De Caprariis - just think if Ingrao [Piero, PCI leader, ed.] had read, not who knows whom, but De Ruggiero. And instead of the followers of Croce [Benedetto, Neapolitan philosopher, ed.] or the adversaries of Croce, there prevailed uncritically this bond which was unjustly attributed to Pasolini with the rural, Catholic world. But conservation is an activity, a morality, a doing, whereas for fifteen years nothing could be seen except the earth trembling and people who in order to be real had to howl in a deafening way.

It Is Not Easy To Arrive At Recent Times

And now let us come up to the last ten months and to their institutional events: municipal elections, referendums, presidential elections, and now the government crisis. It is ever since '67 in Florence that we say we are (not that we should be) a government party. Before it was a verbal stratagem as one speaks of governing one's feelings, one's hopes, the laws... in short, the whole lexicon of Radicalese. Now the old question of the government and the opposition is only more evident. We "governed" the single problems which from time to time we took up. When we went on a hunger strike for the application of art. 81 in the Chamber, and then in '67 we finally succeeded, with only the support of the "ABC" [a popular periodical, ed.], in getting the vote, the preliminary step to the constitutionality of divorce, a ten-vote victory was won by a majority that ranged from the Liberals to the PCI and was opposed by a group ranging from Almirante [neo-Fascist leader, ed.] to the DC, including the DC left, thus i

nverting the political majority and minority groups. We were the only ones to know the regulation, something which happened again in the European Parliament. And this is even more the case for the economy, because the economy on the government level is law, and we know what a range of possible relations exist between law and society.

("Here there is a short interruption, the time to receive an agency that informs us of the latest poll on the relative popularity of Craxi and Spadolini.")

This year, if we won on the referendum, that was due in good part to our having forced a vote on the referendum to show the connection between the two events. The PCI's defeat this year was worse than that of the DC in '74, because the DC was more "substantial". Carniti (7) let loose, and he was not suspect: for twenty years I had accused the CGIL [Communist labour union, ed.] if being with Carniti, and for once the CISL [DC labour union, ed.] took sides with the CFDT [a French labour federation] for neo-Fabian unionism.

In the elections the point to insist on was that the ecologist candidates should be calculated in the question of the overtaking. They told us, Alexander Langer said it, that the ecologist movement was immature: but one is always immature. In politics too it is the concept that counts, the moment of impetus from which life derives, and we were the ones who gave birth to these "Greens", which doesn't mean it stays at home rather than taking a better road of its own. And look here, it is grotesque but not less true that the electoral overtaking depended upon 1.5% more or less. That was enough to make a clamorous defeat into a quasi victory with the consequences that might ensue for the referendum. After which the "Greens" exist and possibly the most anti-Radical ones become part of the five-party majority.

"There might have been..."

But not like this. Here then is another case in which we involved everyone. And if we had been living in a true democracy, if Carniti and I had been able to say our part on the first TV programme, the people's enthusiasm would have passed the abstention.

And see what happens with a divided up democracy that replaced the monarchy at the RAI [state radio-TV, ed.]: that in the first place, if you had managed to get to Bernabei, the sovereign, you would have found 20 million listeners there. Today, even when you can force the casino owners to give you your chip, then it is the employees and the ushers who block your way.

We do not intend to live on reproofs and resentments of the party-power structure. In the Chamber for a year we pointed out the moon to them and they looked at our finger: "Hey, you aren't voting". No longer. We could even enter the government and continue not voting. From this experience, besides ancient history, the circle can be squared between abstentionism and subservience. It is not from love of slogans that we say the impossible and not the possible is possible. On the issue of hunger, we knew very well that we would have to go through the risk of waste in order to reach a reasonable budget. The point is to legitimate the practical value of life, to make current coinage of it against the value put on death, the idea of a just death that can be useful. The law on hunger now exists, and there is Forte and we did not vote for it.

In the elections the defeat was serious and the victory unimportant. At that point you have Craxi who accepts Cossiga. Cossiga is a man that you cannot feel malice for. But the way it was done, that consociative election, is a bad guarantee for a seven-year term [as Italian president, ed.]. One should have taken a risk to get something better for the presidency. Craxi didn't feel up to it. And then there was Carniti who for the presidency of the republic has shown his incapacity once and for all by having the wrong birth date, wrong by two months, and I am sure we would have succeeded in getting him elected. He is a layman, he is not rich and his Christianity is burnt out...

People like De Benedetti and Scalfaro have been thinking for years of turning the republic over to the technocrats, and so they are destabilising elements: as soon as someone does well they go at him. They see everything as black because their consciences are black. We must demonstrate that democracy can do without bloodshed what the technocrats propose to do. Since 1964 I have been in favour of the single nominee, the absolute majority, against proportional representation, and I am ever more in favour of them. Langer wrote in "Il Manifesto" [a far left daily, ed.], in an affectionate article, that I am preparing a majority law. In a certain sense it is true.

The problem is one of law. Everyone knows that the election results depend upon information. There is a vigilance committee whose work is constantly being violated. They say that the law does not foresee sanctions. But there is a common law, and in Italy there is the obligation for penal action against notorious criminal acts; it would be enough to recognise that violation of the law is a subversive act. If I disturb the freedom of the vote by assaulting a polling place or distributing alcoholic drinks, I am guilty of subversion in exactly the same way as when I spread false information which is the common goal of dictatorships and coups d'etat. We will furnish the proof to this judiciary for whom every crime is associative, proof in the true sense of the word, and no one will try to deny that there have been at least five people associating to violate the right to knowledge in order to deliberate. Sooner or later a judge will be found who will arrest them - although he may be swept out of office later.

The PR Is Dying, Long Live the PR...

You see, the Radical Parry is dying, and this may be its triumph. Pasolini had warned to watch out for the day when the intellectuals would take up civil rights and turn them into rights against the minorities, the diverse, who all together make up the majority of society, in fact. Baget once said that we are a minority who represent the great social majorities. At this point the continuance of the party is unnatural, of a death undeclared and without even the honours of a burial. I know what I must do when I grow up, and maybe I will never do it, and maybe I will decide not to grow up. (I want to tell you about the only time that I saw Andreotti confused. It was at the end of a day when we spoiled all his plans, and at the exit I told him "there is no malice on our part, only regret that you insist on not asking yourself what to do when you grow up". For a second I saw him a little upset.) It is not true that men die and ideas continue to live. When Che Guevara died, at the University of Rome I quoted

Garcia Lorca: "You are dead forever and that is why we are here". And we said it for the garrotted Grimau when big official demonstrations were being held everywhere and we went to speak at Centocelle [a working class district of Rome, ed.] in a truck together with old Armando Borghi, the great anarchist. That is why the anarchists were feared, because of free love and their songs of life, against the dark, funereal line of the left.

The importance that we can have, that we do have, is a small miracle of the laity, bordering on injustice. If I can tell you such things and ignore false modesty, it is because they can end by taking something away from others, truly from anyone at all, concretely. When I want to insult Giovanni Negri I tell him that he is older than me. This year, when the craft of politics have given us all recognition, I hope he has also learned that you don't create anything by expertise without a concept of professionality - one used to say seriousness - as a value in itself.

("This is where we end and go to lunch, Marco, Giovanni and I. The names of evangelists except for mine. At lunch I make no notes and we will speak of the coming referendums and of who will become secretary at the congress: things that you will read in other papers".)

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Vittorini - Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) the well-known writer.

2) Pier Paolo Pasolini - (1922-1975) Writer, poet and film-maker.

3) The trial - Pasolini advanced the thesis of putting the entire Italian political leadership on trial.

4) Sciascia - Leonardo Sciascia, (1921-1988) the well known Sicilian writer.

5) Spinelli - Altiero Spinelli (1907-1986), the prime mover of the European Federalist Movement. In 1942 he wrote with Ernesto Rossi the most important European federalist text "The Ventotenne Manifesto". As President of the European Parliament's Commission for Institutional Affairs he proposed in 1984 the approval of the projected European Union Treaty.

6) Scolopio - A Catholic institution for the instruction of poor youths.

7) Carniti - Pierre Carniti (1936 - ) union leader head of the CISL since 1979.