32ND CONGRESS OF THE RADICAL PARTY

SECOND SESSION

ROME - FEBRUARY 26 TO MARCH 1, 1987

ABSTRACT: In thanking the 11,000 citizens who registered with the Radical Party to prevent its closing down, Giovanni Negri states that the Congress will have to decide if this positive result is an end in itself or the point of departure for the creation of the new trans-national party. The project that the Party will have to come up with is based on two "Utopias": a regenerated democracy and the victory of a policy of life, peace, and human rights in Europe and throughout the world.

Rome, February 26, 1987

Friends, new and old Radical comrades, kind guests of the Congress, it is not easy to explain why we are here nor how it has been possible for us to gather together. It would take a lot of time and I intend to be frugal with my words in a report that opens not the 32nd Congress (interrupted at a time when none of us knew if it would ever again be revived) but rather its second session, called in order to fulfil several specific and precise obligations.

What has happened?

Something simple and extraordinary has happened. It has happened that we have been given hope, living hope. As Marco Pannella is fond of saying, hope is sometimes cruel, and it is true because it demands of us intelligence, responsibility and choice. Now that so many hopes have been recognised, have chosen sides, put into play; now that in Italy and the rest of the world thousands of people with the most incredible variety of directions in life, made up of great wisdom or great errors, have chosen to compromise themselves with us Radicals and our history; now that everything confirms that their intent was not to console nor offer solidarity but to invest their trust in us; now we are truly condemned to the heights of this hope, to an equivalent ambition, to opening a new phase of the Radical Party re-establishing the contents of our politics and the necessary tools for asserting it.

There is a choice we must make before all others. It is true: we are or have been given much strength. When there is strength it exacts a price and desires to manifest itself in one of the many possible forms of power. What is that we want to do with our strength? Perhaps the answer is not to be written in a Congressional motion, but each of us must make it. I believe that the power of the Radicals must be more and more the power of the word and of ideas. For some these things are of no account, but for us they are of the highest power. Ambitious as we are, we would not live up to ourselves if we were to learn and adopt the worst aspects of the others rather than try to change the others and give them the best we have in us, which is precisely the power of our ideas and our words.

This, I believe is the best way of thanking all those here who deserve thanks, and I cannot do it because I am supposed to read a book: a register which we, furthermore, have published with the names of the 11,000 members since 1986. A kind of register of civic virtues which mixes names known for their great dignity or guilty of great unworthiness as happens in all battles and so here as well which has been the battle of non-violence and the growth of the Radical Party. The summing up that I owe you of the slightly more than one hundred days which have passed since November until today, is composed of many names: above all the names of the many comrades who have humbly harvested and made a reality of this Radical force which is indispensable for functioning in a framework of democracy and law so deteriorated that there was a danger of our becoming an excuse for it and being chased back to the sidelines.

So we thank you as well as the emblematic and prestigious names who have wanted to be the Radical Party of 1987, from the African countries to the Unites States, from Israel to our own continent, from the greatly honoured Nobel Prize winners to the darkest of cells, from the newspaper editorial offices to the ministries and the regional, national and European parliaments, from the worlds of sport and show business to those of the professions and of culture. And modest thanks, at this point, even to the RAI-TV [Italian State Radio and TV, ed.]. Aside from the praiseworthy exception of the director of the TG2 [Second Channel news service, ed.] and the vain efforts of its President (whom we thank for his second appearance at our Congress, because we know that this action of Enrico Manca's is not one of mere courtesy but of explicit interest and attention), the RAI has conferred on us the great honour of never appearing for a single minute on its programmes for reflection and debate concerning this new part

y and the extraordinary phenomenon it represents which, if it had happened in even an infinitely smaller way within one of the powerful parties, would have received hundreds of free publicity spots weaving the praises of those who had enrolled and of the powerful group they had enrolled in. The RAI has confirmed for us that we are truly different, far from its ways and methods of which we are the victims.

And its disinformation, as we well know, also strikes other parties daily such as the DP (Proletarian Democracy, a far-left party), the MSI (neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement), and even the PCI (Italian Communist Party), or minority factions within the parties as in the case of the DC (Christian Democrats) or entire social groups.

And hurray!, despite this kind of TV, this Italian world of show business, which well knows the consequences of Radical affiliations, chooses this party. I say this while thinking again of Claudio Villa (1). I say this because I have faith that the day can come when we too, Enzo, as you in all justice had the right to do, if the Constitution, information and truth are respected, can appeal along with you to the Italian citizen from that TV screen and say, "now then, where were we?".

Our greetings, instead, are extended to all those who with journalistic professionalism have had the capacity to understand and explain this wonderful Radical adventure; or whoever all by himself, outside the Radical Party organisation, still succeeds in true and living anti-conformity, culture and criticism, as in the case of Leonardo Sciascia. The agreement and almost sense of liberation that greeted Sciascia's words in his last polemic have something about them like the recognition we have received through thousands of enrolments: they have the common mark of a conflict in which, through thousands of forms, common people and real powers are counterposed; a wide-spread demand for true rules rather than old and false rites, between the citizen and the state. Another sign of that "party of law", of which I spoke in my November report, so present in all political and social sectors as it is submerged and frustrated by a system that humiliates democracy and reduces the institutions to fetishes. But if in

fact, as I believe, the question of the certainty of law and of giving back a body and soul to a republican democracy which has been despoiled of them, is something which many people today feel to be the very first priority, then the Radical Party, with its great energy, capacity, and competence has a precise responsibility and we must loosen this other not too. We must decide if the results obtained in December and January are a final goal for us, a point of arrival, or not rather a point of departure, the sign of the newly possible announcing its presence which does not regard us alone and which can seek and find in people, not only in Italy, an even greater miracle than the one encountered in recent weeks. The road of Realpolitik would impel us to count and count again our patrimony accumulated with so much fatigue. The road of our history and of intelligence, I think, should rather impel us to invest and risk it in a new, great Radical Utopia, that is in a precise, proposal, project and goal.

Furthermore, it would be a mistake to confuse our greater subjective strength with the overcoming of conditions of non-democracy, of non-certainty of law and the rules of the game which the Pannella resolution denounced, drawing the closure of the party as a conclusion from it. The thousands and thousands of new PR members in these months, who are obviously very few in comparison to the millions of members of other parties and the labour unions, are not in themselves the sign of democracy regained: from the Constitutional Court which rips referendums from institutions whose roles have been eviscerated, to all the aspects of the citizen-state relationship (pensions, health care, employment), to the poisonous mushroom-like growth of hidden powers or illegitimate power excesses, always under the sign of the non-regulation, always at the mercy of the potentates and merchants (of arms or other things), not to mention the information media and the administration of justice, one truly cannot speak of the regai

ning of democracy and the certainty of legality. The thousands of new Radicals are, instead, the resources, the energy and the strength of a Party which must give itself a credible project.

We today want to reform republican democracy.

We today want to try a rigorous, organised and non-violent way of overturning the dominant tendencies of international politics which are more and more the tendency to war, misery, and political and economic subjection. This is what we want to make of this marvellous, relative Radical strength.

And these two Utopias, a regenerated democracy, the victory of a policy of life, peace, and human rights in Europe and the rest of the world are not mere rhetoric for us. For us it is the "hic et nunc" that counts. For us to project a trans-national party of European unity and human rights, and a trans-party force, a "second party" of democratic political reform, means to live, work, understand, and organise ourselves for already achieving a solid basis of re-foundation. A process of political re-foundation that we must start at this point and which certainly will not entirely fulfil itself only in the statutory and organisational re-foundation of the Radical Party, however arduous that in itself may already be, because the logical complement of this re-foundation is the deep reconsideration of the other parties too as well as the political and institutional set-up of our societies and, hence, of all Europe.

A trans-national party in the footsteps of Rossi (2) and Spinelli (3) to give immediately constituent powers to the Strasbourg Parliament so that the European peoples can vote and make themselves heard to myopic bureaucrats and governments, for the sake of a Unites States of Europe, for a reply to those great problems of our time that have all been identified and touched upon by Radical politics. These are problems of world government: in the face of the two superpowers we cannot leave the vacuum of the small European powers destined to become a vacuum of responsibility. Neither can we as citizens identify ourselves only with those empty semblances which are the party internationals. Only the first workers' international succeeded for a short time in history in being trans-national (one became a direct member of it and not of one's own national party), before the party internationals became dangerous tools of hegemony or simply moments of confrontation of opinion among the various national parties. But

that experience was enough to foresee for decades the explosion of the workers' question as just exactly a question that crossed frontiers and demanded replies beyond all the frontiers. Today, much more than at that time, the decisive questions for our life and societies demand trans-national parties and above all international positive law and institutions.

The national state today is nothing but a container of the past: peace and security, the right to life in the Third and Fourth Worlds where extermination and the criminal use of food as a weapon are tools of competition for domination, menaces that may be irreversible to the ecological equilibrium of the planet, rights and guarantees of freedom to be regained and rewritten in the presence of incessant technological revolution - these are all crucial questions that cannot find any answers on the level of the national state.

To try laying the foundations of the trans-national party of a new humanism, of non-violence and of law, the Congress needs to reflect and reach a decision, precise membership goals and the opening of a political battle front outside the boundaries of our country. And this obviously must not lead us into an error: to be a trans-national party does not mean to export a small party to one country or another. For every individual it can mean to give a central place, wherever he may live and work, to these great issues which directly regard our lives, and perhaps paying once again the price of being taken for mad because rather than speaking of municipal councils, banks and national health units we will once again speak of extermination through hunger and the affirmation of conscience or the ozone hole, desertification, protection of the seas, or because we will conduct campaigns for the lives and liberty of those who are victims of totalitarian regimes. A United States of Europe, an emergency initiative fo

r the life of the South of the world and the affirmation of human rights are the triptych of a non-violent programme that can become active politics to the measure of the single citizen and of the state. And allow me on this subject of affirming human rights, in the East as in the West, (that West where the case of Paula Cooper is becoming the symbol of opprobrium of the death penalty which must be wiped out if the West, as we hope, truly wishes to become the symbol of civilisation and tolerance) - allow me, I ask, to make a few statements concerning our fight against anti-semitism and against the Soviet system, which have been the motivation of so many initiatives during this last period.

I believe that without confusing two phenomena as different as anti-semitism and anti-zionism, we must commit ourselves even more to the defence of the Jews wherever they are persecuted, as well as of the state of Israel from those attacks which are not legitimate and necessary criticisms by those who judge their responsibility and political choices, but are preconceived hostility and mechanical solidarity with Israel's enemies.

Two facts are absolutely certain:

1) In the USSR and other countries of the Soviet orbit, in the Middle East - particularly Syria, Iraq and Iran -, in Moslem and non-Moslem African countries, the Jews are persecuted as such for racist, ideological, religious and political reasons;

2) however wrong and hateful may appear the Israeli war actions in the countries they occupy and administer, Israel is not the primary, most serious and intolerable cause of the tragedies of the Arab and other ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East. Unfortunately it must be recognised that in no other Middle Eastern country do Arab citizens have more freedom and the right to dissent than in the West Bank of the Jordan and in Israel. In Israel and the occupied territories these rights are minimal and in danger, but they exist. The dictatorships are ferocious in Syria, in Lebanon, in North and South Yemen, in the Emirates, in Saudi Arabia and even in Jordan. In those places the rights of individuals and the people are equally ignored by sovereigns and dictators as well as the generality of the international left affected by a kind of ideological racism: individuals and peoples exist only if victims of Israel or represented as such.

The only responsibility assumed is for the "liberation" and the independence of Palestine. If this should take place according to the culture and the ideology of the Arab ruling classes and their Western supporters of both right and left, it is easy to predict that - within a few years - Israel would have to receive the likes of Arafat and his opponents as political refugees, according to which faction should prove victorious.

For us Israel is and must more and more become an historical bridgehead of political democracy for all, and which must be the recognised right of all Middle Eastern citizens. In our vision of the United States of Europe, Israel must find its place as a full member with all the responsibilities and honours that this involves.

Those who know the positions of Elie Wiesel, of our comrade Herbert Pagani, of Marek Halter - to whom we send our affectionate and thankful greetings for the trust he has shown by enrolling in the Party for the first time in his long life as an intransigently democratic militant, Jew and Zionist - or the positions of Bruno Zevi, of Rita Levi Montalcini, of Raffaello Fellah, or of Shulamith Aloni and her party, cannot doubt for one moment that we firmly intend to create the conditions in a short time for the opening of a new battle front for defending the rights of the most remote and unknown of all the citizens, Palestinian, Arab, Iranian and Iraqi men and women...

No one can doubt that if Israel is loved and defended by the Radicals, by democrats, like their own fatherland, each of us (whether Israeli, French, Italian, African or American citizen) will love it with all the rigor, the civil passion which we have in Italy towards what appears to us to be an error or a crime committed by those who govern us.

Let it be perfectly clear that other general interpretations of the problem, equally legitimate, may possibly exist in our party. The thing which must unite us, even if only on the level of a common orientation, are the specific actions that we can all desire even for other reasons, even besides those of general kinds of judgements.

For example, I think of extending and intensifying our militant action, direct, non-violent action, beyond the limits of classical political and institutional action, in order to obtain from Europe and Italy a privileged relationship of institutional alliance with Israel and so that the greatest number of refusniks in the USSR and everywhere else may be able to great each other with their traditional greeting: "Next year in Jerusalem", because this must become a literal fact. But we must do everything truly possible so that along with Joseph Begun, also Grigory Lemberg, Alexei Magarik, Marat Osnis, Dora Kostantinovskaja, Grigory Rosenstein, Natalie Rosenstein, Cerna Golodort, and Ida Nudel find themselves "this year in Jerusalem". How are we to do this together with the enormous burden we are bearing on so many fronts, from that of extermination by hunger to that of a life under law. For this reason we must appeal not only and not so much to Jews as to non-Jews to enrol, to give us the strength and ener

gy to conduct and realise this initiative.

We ended 1986 with the manifestations in Rome, Jerusalem, Brussels and Paris, outside the Soviet embassies, asking for freedom for the ten refusniks chosen by us after the visit of the European Parliament delegation to the Knesset. On that occasion, a few days after the liberation of Sacharov, we decided to express our non-violent position by giving our best wishes for 1987 to the Soviet people and leaders in the hope that they would continue along a road that they had already seemed to have started on.

Since there seems to have been some doubt and misunderstanding, despite a generally positive evaluation of the action, there is need to clarify this point too once and for all.

We believe that only a non-violent, Gandhian organisation of courageous political action can discharge that efficacious fight for human, civil, political and religious rights (in brief, for a constitutional state and for political democracy) which today is not only an urgent duty, but the only suitable arm in a clash between two absolutely contrasting systems and sets of ideals.

The Radical Party must become more and more this organisation in Western Europe as well as in the Europe oppressed by the Soviets and practising Communism. For this purpose we must be adequately prepared. That means we must violate the legitimate legality of those states, violate it deliberately, in an organised fashion, in order to affirm the fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Charter of Human Rights ever since the signing of the Helsinki Treaty.

We must work to get our Western governments to change their policies, the Italian government as well as the others. We can begin doing this starting with our presence in the European Parliament and the Italian Parliament and among our fellow members of parliament of the Parliamentarians for World Order, of whom we hope many will want to enrol in our Radical Party.

But we must operate by demanding that the destabilisation of governments and dictatorial systems becomes the official, non-violent strategy of countries of political democracy.

We have been saying it for a long time: this destabilisation must make use of all the force of the new technologies, with always more and better, loyal information about those peoples, in the first place concerning the crimes against human and political rights that are being systematically practised against them.

Without all this, the new Maginot lines of missiles and deterrents are destined to be dangerous and grotesque choices.

We are with Bukowski when he reminds the West that the arms Moscow fears are not nuclear ones but the ones of the ideas of justice, freedom and democracy, and that these arms must be used to the hilt. We are with our comrade Leonid Pliusc when he admonishes that Gorbachev can certainly go much further in his liberalisation of the empire, but not as far as self-democratisation, not as far as the creation of a constitutional state and political democracy with full respect of human and civil rights.

But we must seize this moment of favourable contradiction while being careful to ask ourselves, for example, if it is not already happening that hundreds of people are being liberated with great publicity while at the same time the state is not imprisoning and persecuting thousands of others.

As a party we might also think of beginning to work for the purpose of setting up this militant policy within two or three years, which would cause the arrest of hundreds rather than dozens of non-violent Radicals for months rather than hours, to circulate pamphlets, flyers, printed information in tens of thousands of copies, and we really mean in two or three years, not ten or fifteen.

Certainly we will be able to accomplish this if this "second party" should become just that for thousands of exiles and dissidents in Europe and America with the hard necessity of their really paying their membership dues so that the day may soon come in which it will be perhaps a "dissident", a democrat, a libertarian Russian or Pole or Hungarian who will run the platform of the PR's platform for struggles and institutional responsibility.

Allow me here, however, to thank in the name, I believe, of all Radicals the Polish refugees, some 2,000 exiles, forgotten in our reception camps, who, on the day we promoted against Jaruzelski, tore the Radical sandwich posters off our backs to wear them themselves. At that moment the "Radical people" was for an instant that which we knew we could and must be.

They were there, 2,000 of them, abandoned and betrayed, to say: "We too are Radicals", and we replied, "we too are Poles and belong to Solidarity". And to these friends I repeat with the same rigor as on that day, the hard necessity of the membership dues is the eye of the needle through which we must make pass the growth of this "people" and of this "party" - in order to be able to cry "Long live the Russian democracy, long live the Polish democracy, long live democracy in the Eastern countries".

Therefore, a trans-national party. A decision that will be long and thoroughly debated in the congressional commissions, each of which is a veritable prestigious assembly in itself for the type of initiative which is foreseen. A choice to be meditated upon, because it is destined to leave deep traces upon the life of the Party, at least as much as those of the trans-party Party, the party which would present itself as a "second party" in order to be immediately the party for the reform of the political system and not merely give lip service to that task. In fact, this goal does not coincide with the will to inflate ourselves at all costs. On the contrary, it obliges us to reject - all the more so if there are ten or twenty thousand of us - any tendency to small-time party-power kind of thinking. The party of reform, of democracy and law can be the party of a fecund, wide-spread associational character, but it cannot be a party as apparatus, a state controlled party, a territorial party of installation a

nd occupation.

Take the example of the local agencies. Mauro Mellini is right about them. Instead of their being autonomous, there has been established a permanent system of contracting and negotiating among the State, the Region, the Town with a coming and going of proxies, jurisdictions, etc. And the negotiating is done within the party-power system, which, one must admit, becomes the keystone of an institutional apparatus which would otherwise go to pieces. With its "summits", patronage, understandings, sharing of spoils, organisation charts and even its kick-backs, it assures a minimum of rationality, however brutal and thieving, to an institutional chaos that otherwise could never be untangled. In this system the independent-minded political forces of the various regions are in substance kept from having any power even when they are very large and head commissions such as the PSDAZ (4).

This is the tragic parody of the independent groups. And, in any case, there can be no independent groups if there is no constitutional state, no certainty of legality, no clarity in the laws, no obedience to the Constitution. If Einaudi (5) said "Away with the prefect!", the reform party of today must say: "Away with these local agencies!"

So our problem is not to take power in Regions, Provinces and Towns, but to fight to re-create them.

And it is evident that to provoke reforms means to be a party that passes through the most various political experiences and makes them pass through it.

The Radicals are the first party, but even more the second one, the necessary party for the citizen who besides his own political creed or membership card wants to guarantee and have the guarantee of hope for reform. Thus it is a party that must do away even more with its independent candidacy in the elections.

Thanks to Marco Pannella and to the firmness with which more than a year ago he forced us to look reality in the face; thanks to his intuition and his sometimes difficult help - because the relationship with Marco is certainly very difficult just because it is very creative - today we find ourselves in a much stronger and more credible position.

It is our responsibility not to disperse it. We want to make of the Radical Party a place where even those who come from the most diverse ideological viewpoints and parties can encounter each other free of all party-power bonds, factional or group ties.

Thus for us there is a great value in the dual-party-memberships taken out by hundreds and hundreds of Socialist comrades, lay friends, as well as Catholics and Communist Party members and people of practically all other parties. Their numbers are certainly not great, yet of great significance. For the first time an element of our federative and libertarian Statute has truly taken on substance.

We must make it grow. An asphyxiating, blocked and swampy political system has more need than ever of this kind of phenomenon, at least until an Anglo-Saxon kind of set-up does not oblige all the parties to change, creating parliamentary and not state-controlled parties, finally giving breath and fresh oxygen to civil society and its freedom of association.

Our only insistent request of those friends and comrades who today have a dual-party-membership and those many who we hope will want to take one out is simply that of participating in dialogue. Never anything else but that, absolutely no prohibitions, orders, disciplines. These latter do not exist even in the case of elections, the drawing up of the tickets, the candidacies. The Radical member or dual-party-member is completely free, which is to say completely responsible.

Our only discipline is our responsibility.

Certainly the vocation, the choice of being a "second party", which is much more like a Fabian society capable of emitting change rather than creating an apparatus, puts us in the happy condition of watching others, of what is happening for good or for bad, with serenity and rigor.

I do not intend here to make a complete analysis of the positions of the other parties, not even the friendly ones.

In general I feel impelled to emphasise, even more than I did in the first session of the 32nd Congress, the acquisition of an ever more solid friendship established with the PSI (Socialist Party) despite our many differences and divergent answers to mutual problems. From our own Congress we send now a fraternal greeting to the PSI's Congress in Rimini. We are pleased to find that in their pre-congressional statement, the Socialists once again have taken a step in a direction joining our own. The proposal for the direct election of the President of the Republic was certainly aiming at obtaining the consensus - technically necessary - of the PCI (Communist Party) and the DC (Christian Democrats) for this constitutional reform which is of great symbolic importance even if modest in its constitutional significance. And we understand perfectly well that in this case the straight uninominal system was not considered either necessary or opportune.

The reply obtained ought to make possible, we hope, a new, different, mutual acquisition: the definitive goal is the direct election of the Head of the Executive as a constitutional reform. And meanwhile, as a consequence, one chooses in this context the Anglo-Saxon uninominal reform of the electoral system. If this hope of ours should come true, within 40 days at most Italian political life would undergo the beginning of the most important democratic reform of the republican political system.

What is true for and about our Socialist comrades, we also consider to be true for our liberal friends. We do not intend to budge one iota from our choice and our will to not tolerate in their regard the least discrimination, the least gratuitous and unjust suspicion. We too are liberals, as are the Liberals. I ask your pardon for the obviousness of the observation, but it is partly due to the quality of the polemics in regard to the PLI (Italian Liberal Party).

We say to our comrades of the PSDI (Social Democrats), after the effervescent sorties of comrade Nicolazzi, and recognising his sympathetic, favourable and friendly attention towards us, that we will nevertheless remain - without complexes in regard to anyone - firmly opposed to that stupid kind of anti-Social-Democratic racism which in Italy is fed on petty excuses. We regret their lack of commitment to the referendums, we are pleased about their full availability to form common tickets for the Senate race, even if for us these are unthinkable without the participation of the Liberals if we absolutely have to resign ourselves (but we don't intend to) to doing without the Republicans.

What regards the Greens is easy. We want the Greens ticket on the the national elections ballot, we will support it, and if it seems opportune we will have to take on the job of guaranteeing that they achieve the necessary quorum. We do not doubt that this will once again bring us a substantial provisional enmity from the voters and the elected. But it is a price that we can once again pay to friendship and our mutual ideals and civil aims.

The need for a profound reform of the political system and the acquisition of democratic reforms, however, we would wish to see receive more and better consideration from the Communist Party whom we ask to give their attention and make comparisons. We do now want gratuitous polemics with them used as a pretext. The PCI seems to oscillate perennially between the hypotheses of government programmes and the enunciation of the alternative. There seems to me something that does not function, a blockage of some kind, in all that which obliges the PCI's summit to change into or to appear to be the defender of the status quo on every important occasion. How is it that the PCI does not understand that a lay government alliance as an alternative to the DC (problematic certainly, difficult to construct, but this is something which is constantly more being discussed) if it could be realised would be the first and most useful interlocutor for a politics of true change?

Certainly in this case there would be a dialogue and an alliance among equals, a democratic alliance as there ought to be, in place of the design that the PCI continues to pursue, aiming at choosing from time to time interlocutors among small, subaltern and divided parties that can easily be controlled. I believe that to solve some of their crucial problems, our Communist comrades must first of all solve this one by no longer giving the impression that the whole inner and outer debate is delegated to the pages of »Tango and Bobo (6), however likeable he may be.

For the rest, today we have all the requisites for a project of reforming the republican democracy. Over two hundred members of parliament of the most diverse parties, mayors of large cities, regional councillors, prestigious figures have been inspired by the Radical Party to form the League For The Reform Of The Electoral System aiming for a uninominal and Anglo-Saxon model. It is an alliance that shows just how insufferable is a pluralism that has become nothing but a sharing of the spoils and a political struggle reduced to Lebanese dimensions. In the coming weeks we must go forward along this road and at the same time continue to strengthen our struggles.

Let us take the battle concerning justice as an example: what might a stronger Radical Party not accomplish if only two thousand Radicals already were able to make the plague of Italian justice a central political issue? And what is the significance of a Congress that is host here, greeting with affection and non-violence, the members, the comrades from the cells of Rebibbia [a Rome prison, ed.] who have appealed with find and deep non-violent words to the assassins who bathed Rome in blood a few days ago, presenting themselves as the most reliable and functional allies of those who do not want there to be either big or little reforms, nor escapes from the emergency, nor just solutions, at last, to such shameful things as the April 7 case (7)? The appeal process for this latter is now underway and for us it is the real test of the will to change a dangerous and violent judicial praxis.

Penal and civil justice, super-trials and penitent criminals, government budgets and reforms for prison guards, the police and the Carabinieri, prisons and courts - all of these are issues which thanks primarily to Radical initiatives have involved the politicians. Our commitment must grow, just as the NO will grow to a project of Rognoni's on the civil responsibility of judges which rather than satisfy the motives for the referendum requested on this issue would only make the present norms worse.

On energy and the environment, with or without the Constitutional Court, it is necessary that sooner or later a great majority of the public against hunting should be able to vote and express its opinions. This is a commitment that we assume for reasons of pure and simple democracy more than for the contents of the struggle. And I hope the Radical associations will stand always more firmly by those against vivisection, air and water pollution, the closing to private automobile traffic of the historic city centres and for cities that are made to the measure of man, by working in that ecological movement which we were the ones to inspire and of which we are rightly an integral part.

Much water, unfortunately always more polluted, has passed under the bridge since that year of 1978 when Forattini (a famous political cartoonist, ed.) drew Pannella with a poster of the "nuclear energy referendum" in his mouth being whipped by an oil sheikh for whom he was working as a porter. Today, almost ten years later and after Chernobyl, you see how time has justified us.

And today, from here, we send a pious thought of solidarity to the Energy Conference which is underway, because it is so entertaining and doesn't mean a thing. The only energy conference that means anything is the one that has been called for June 14 and which will be a unique, extraordinary occasion for political and scientific debate to be confronted with serenity and no preconceived ideas. These battles of ours are already in themselves exceptional tools for putting politics and democracy back in the hands of the citizen in order to rejuvenate a worn-out and paralysed system. It is a strange adventure, that of the Radicals. When on a tedious afternoon in January, more than a year ago, we sat around a table and thought out a referendum on justice; when on a somewhat more serene morning we launched three referendums on nuclear energy (and it was no easy thing, believe me, to convince some of the Greens who were as green as you can get to join us in it) we truly did not think we would be able to trigger

off such a violent explosion on these great issues, nor to create such a lot of nightmares in so many palaces of politics and party offices for potentates and corporations who - having been touched on the nerve that hurts - are reacting in a confused and arrogant manner.

And when with all our intransigent passion for democracy we asked the citizens to abstain from voting and we ourselves adopted the no-vote system in Parliament to denounce the systematic distortion of the rules of the game in the institutions, we never even thought that within a few years we would turn out to be the parliamentary group that could perhaps claim the most significant and efficacious record of victories. One need only think of the Andreotti-Sindona affair and the IRI's (8) illegal funds, the scandals that blew up over pay-offs for the arms sales to Iraq and Iran, the additional funds that allowed for the launching of the new penal code and the modernisation of the structures and instruments of the police in Campania, Calabria and Sicily.

Ten non-voting deputies accused of obstructionism or servility and two thousand citizens - that's how many of us there were then - knew better than any other big or small party of the opposition, how to be a party of truly good management of the burning issues of those days and of a truly efficacious opposition that upsets the games, divides, puts together new alliances.

But now we must set our sights higher. The stakes are the reform of the republican democracy. For this too, even if all the conditions are propitious for us, we say no to early elections. It is a no that is fashionable, but we really believe it when we say it because of that prudence and sense of responsibility that have always been Radical virtues.

It is a triple NO. NO because one cannot arbitrarily use elections to block referendums that by now have to be held. Parliament had whole decades, then months and months in which to legislate. Now it can do nothing but warm up the usual last minute hash which has been seen and tried. Nor is it possible to invoke special pleading on the risk of the referendum's breaking up the majority coalition. In various other referendums the parties of the coalition found themselves on opposite sides and this did not bring about a government crisis and the dissolution of Parliament. Those who claim the problems of the five-party coalition are caused by the referendum process are making a false claim. NO because dozens and dozens of laws would be skipped over which are important for the general public as well as for important categories and this would be a very high price to pay. One need only think of the reform of civil and administration process, of the local health units, of pensions and prison guards, of the laws

on arms trafficking, on linguistic minorities, on energy saving... and these are only a few examples.

And NO, finally, because we cannot accept that for the last twenty years a material, de facto Constitution has been in effect that assigns Parliament a maximum of four years of life. Nor can we accept that this occurs at the moment in which the year before us can be decisive for some precise institutional reforms and that a reflex process present in various political forces which could transform the natural 1988 election date from the last, tired and repetitive occasion for scraping the bottom of the party-power system barrel into the first effective occasion the country has been given to choose new institutions, new rules, perhaps new and never before tried alliances.

If we are going to have early elections imposed on us, we will consider what is to be done: but it certainly will not be these elections with their laughable contingent results and effects to dissuade us from pursuing either the international campaign which must immediately be animated, or the goal of reforming the political system. If anything, the elections should be put to this end by attempting to form an alliance - at least by way of the elections and the tickets in the Senate, if not those in the Chamber - a front for federalist and republican reform capable of proposing to the country a thorough change in the institutional and political set-ups.

As you can see, comrades, having won the first part of the Radical challenge involves much reflection, debate and responsibility on our part.

Now the reasons and the hopes in whose name we have put dramatically into discussion the existence of the party demands and calls us to face an even more difficult challenge. I don't think this is a day-dream, even if it is not always bad to day-dream. Yours is the task of reasoning, deciding, transforming this project and this challenge into reality with all of the intelligence and tenacity the Radicals are capable of.

May your work go well, may this be a good 32nd Congress.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Claudio Villa - A popular singer of light music and operetta.

2) Rossi, Ernesto - (Caserta 1897 - Rome 1967). Italian statesman and journalist. A leader of »Giustizia e Libertà [an anti-Fascist movement] he was arrested and convicted by the Fascists in 1930. He remained in prison or in confinement until the end of the war. With A. Spinelli he wrote the »Manifesto di Ventotene and led the European Federalist Movement in the fight for a united Europe. He was among the founders of the Radical Party. An essayist and journalist, he promoted from the pages of »Il Mondo a lively campaign against clerical interference in political life, against the economic potentates, industrial and agrarian protectionism, the concentration of public and private power, etc. His articles were collected into famous books (»I padroni del vapore etc.) After the dissolution of the Radical Party in 1962 and the ensuing rupture with the managing editor of »Il Mondo M. Pannunzio, he founded the review »Astrolabio from whose pages he continued his polemics. During his last years he established

close ties with the "new" Radical Party with which he collaborated in launching the "Anti-Clerical Year" in 1967.

3) Spinelli, Altiero - (Roma 1907 - 1922). During Fascism (1929-1942) he was imprisoned as leader of the Communist Youth. In 1942 he drafted together with Ernesto Rossi the »Manifesto di Ventotene which affirmed that only a federalist Europe could impede the return of the fratricidal wars in Europe and regain for the continent a prominent place on the world scene. At the end of the war he founded the European Federalist Movement with Rossi, Eugenio Colorni and others. After the crisis of the European Defence Community (1956) he became a member of the European Commission from which point of observation he criticised the evolution of the Community's structures. In 1979 he was elected to the European Parliament on the Italian Communist Party ticket (PCI), becoming the guiding spirit in the realisation of the project for a treaty adopted by that Parliament in 1984 and known as the "Spinelli Project".

4) PSDAZ - Partito Sardo d'Azione (Sardinian Action Party).

5) Einaudi, Luigi - (Carru 1874 - Rome 1961) Statesman and economist, exiled under Fascism, president of the Bank of Italy from 1945, Budget Minister under the fourth De Gasperi government, he held down inflation with a restrictive monetary policy while encouraging reconstruction with a liberal policy. President of the Republic from 1948 - 1955.

6) »Tango and Bobo - Tango was a satirical supplement of the Communist Party daily »L'Unità for many years and Bobo a popular cartoon figure who appeared there.

7) The April 7 case - A trial in Padua against intellectuals of the far-left group »Autonomia Operaia [Workers' Autonomy] who were accused of being Red Brigades leaders. In the end the defendants were acquitted.

8) IRI - Istituto per la Riconversione Industriale (Institute for Industrial Reconversion), established in 1933 to reorganise Italian industry which was undergoing difficulties. After the war IRI, with its financing companies, banks and agencies became the keystone of the Italian state-owned industrial system.