ABSTRACT: "The Cicciolina aftermath, the freeze in relations with Craxi, the trans-national party. Pannella changes everything again, even headquarters and language. The next stop: Brussels. The next myth: the Mahatma. And a new hero: Mathias Rust.

(This article was written at the conclusion of the Radical Party Congress in Bologna, January 2 - 6, 1988, which decided to transform the PR into a trans-national/trans-party group which consequently will not participate in the Italian national elections.)

(EPOCA, January 10,1988)

"Do you know Greenpeace? Well, we are going to be the Greenpeace of law. Serious, ready and yet spectacular. We will travel all around the old continent to convince everyone of the urgent necessity of creating the United States of Europe. We will get signatures on petitions like the one against hunger in Africa subscribed to by the Noble Prize winners. But we will also prepare for action.

"We will learn foreign languages, we will explore the earth, but we will also be up to athletics like Mathias Rust who landed his airplane on Red Square in Moscow."

With these words Party Secretary Giovanni Negri, thirty one and from Turin, announced to the Bologna Congress, the contribution the Radicals intend to make to the Italian institutional crisis. And there is no doubt that this is a Radical kind of solution. The rose in the fist (i.e., the party symbol, ed.) is taking its leave, moving away from Italy and preparing to strike - naturally with the weapon of non-violence - under the severe but understanding gaze of Mahatma Gandhi who will become their symbol. " And from now on", Negri continues, "I exclude the possibility that the Radicals, with the symbol of Gandhi, can still run in the Italian elections. Any Radical who wants to, of course, is free to run on any party ticket he likes, but as far as the party goes, we've had done with it. Did people want someone to be a good example? Well here it is then: we are disarming unilaterally with regard to the elections. Now we are waiting for someone else to follow our example. And if they don't, never mind. But a

s far as we are concerned, to continue to make politics only in Italy is too frustrating."

As usual the Radical Party's 34th Congress is not banal. As well as the face of Gandhi, the Bologna Convention Hall is hung with those of Altiero Spinelli (1) and Ernesto Rossi (2), and in circulation there are the names and representatives of a world half unknown: dissidents from the East such as Leonid Pliutsch; Mike Ajay, who immigrated to Turin from Nigeria and who within a year, thanks to the rotation system, will sit in the Italian Parliament as a deputy, the first black in history to do so. There are Spanish intellectuals and autonomists, Israeli civil rights activists, French and Belgian federalists, English experts in the fight against drug addiction... but the scenario is entirely different from last years'.

Twelve months ago the Radicals went to their Congress dramatically announcing that they were dissolving the party. They had very few members and felt unbearably discriminated against by the "mass media". Marco Pannella announced that the "minimum conditions" did not exist for carrying on political activity and had even already drafted the small but glorious party's last will and testament. But things did not go as foreseen. It turned out that the Radicals' were pushed into continuing by nothing other than the official Italian political world. There was a deafening chorus of eulogies from Cossiga to Craxi to Spadolini, Nicolazzi, Altissimo, Montanelli, to chairman of the RAI (Italian state radio/tv, ed.) Enrico Manca.

This year in Bologna it is different. No one is working up too much excitement to ask the Radicals to stay in Italy or not to transfer themselves to the mists of Brussels. And above all, no one seems to be offering Pannella's party anything.

One knows, there was the case of the unacceptable Ilona Staller (3). But is it all her fault? Is it only the fault of that pale and untiring Hungarian lady if Marco Pannella was not offered a government post? If the party that for twenty years has created movements that were turned into laws and which has never had any of its representatives go under judicial inquiry, has had the Palazzo's (4) door slammed in its face? The Radical Party naturally maintains that it is not so. For the old leader of the party the treatment reserved for the Radicals is the triumph of myopic politics, of the Palazzo's smoke-filled rooms, against which not even the large-hearted can successfully fight. Craxi, the principal point of reference, "has become gelid", says Pannella. The libertarian pole of the Socialists, with 20 per cent of the votes, does not function because in place of the big projects, they limit themselves to awaiting the last breath of the Social Democrats and keeping their eyes lowered. The Palazzo moves in

a damned slow and trivial pace, and thus one cannot see why anyone with moral fibre should continue to waste his time in the waiting rooms of the party secretaries. Away then, away. Let's to Europe. Away like errant knights. Away like the anti-Fascists who chose the Spanish civil war and not like Benedetto Croce (5) who chose to stay home...

One cannot fight against feelings, especially in the house of the Radicals. And so it is useless to remind them of the many victories their movement has brought home - for example, the fact that the campaign against hunger in Africa produced a law and that Italy is the only country in the world that has cancelled its nuclear (energy, ed.) programme. Or that the referendum won which made judges legally responsible for their actions and decisions. All of this, which would be more than enough for a small party to have accomplished, is no longer enough for Marco Pannella. The leader will as usual be relentless with those who want to convince him to accept the pace and the habits of a quiet life.

So in Bologna too, as in all Radical Congresses, the duel will be staged that has been announced between "Utopia" and the policy of "short steps".

And, as always, everyone is called upon to play his part. This year Enzo Tortora (6) is urged up to the platform to say that it is a mistake to flee to Europe when there is still so much to be done in Italy. Then it is the turn of Massimo Teodori to ask Marco not to repeat Che's error who, tired of Cuba, went off to die in the Bolivian mountains. Francesco Rutelli, the outgoing chairman of the parliamentary group is also called to justify himself. And finally the old lion replies to them all explaining that yes, "perhaps the trans-national party will abort and everything will dissolve into a babbling collapse of nonsensical and marginal voices... Perhaps Europe will be a pathetic repetition of Che's errant and erring journey in search of a »different death when faced with a life all-too-much »the same . But, Marco Pannella concludes, "it is also possible that this will not happen". And someone will be found to succeed him to spread Gandhi's teaching and the love of law or the Anglo-Saxon electoral syst

em, to hunger along with the terrorists of the Basque countries, or in favour of a conscientious objector in front of a Belgian barracks. Because, in the last analysis it is also true that Marco has reached the good age of 58, but it was he who invented charisma in Italy: Celentano (7) came later.o

The Radicals in any case leave official Italian politics a considerable and embarrassing endowment: no one, obviously, will be allowed to use the old party symbol, but there remains on the election market their 2.6% of the vote, one million Italians, who will have to choose a party to vote for already in the European elections of 1989 or else abstain. And frankly no one knows where those votes are likely to go. Just as no one knows what effect on Italian political customs this unexpected "political migration" may have in a country where everyone talks about European union but with their eyes well fixed on the Rome-Viterbo-Latina-Frosinone constituency. And no one can exclude the possibility that today's Radical issues (power for the European Parliament, defining a European Community foreign policy, the certainty of democratic rules in expectation of the free market due in 1992) will not become in effect concrete and real issues.

"An exasperated expression of the liberal left in Italy" was how the philosopher Norberto Bobbio defined the Radicals already twenty years ago. The definition continues to be a happy one.

We can do nothing but wait to see where the Greenpeace of Law is going to strike. Who knows, perhaps Pannella will cross the Persian Gulf, walking on the water, to save young Iraqi and Iranian deserters. (And how angry he will be when the newspapers write that this proves the Radicals do not know how to swim.)

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) 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".

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 establishe

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

3) Staller, Ilona - (Budapest 1951) - Hungarian porno artist better known by her stage name "Cicciolina", elected to Parliament in 1987 on the Radical lists.

4) Palazzo - Literally "the palace". In journalistic parlance the symbol of political power in its negative aspects of insensitivity and dishonesty with regard to the needs and demands of the people. Somthing like the halls of power in English.

5) Croce, Benedetto - (Pescasseroli 1866 - Naples 1952) - Italian philosopher, historian, writer. After a brief youthful flirtation with Marx, he and Giovanni Gentile were responsible for the idealistic and Hegelian revival at the end of the last century. Anti-Fascist, essentially a liberal-conservative, after the war he was a member of the Liberal Party and was also a part of one of the first Italian post-Fascist governments. Under Fascism he exerted great influence on important sectors of the youth. As a philosopher he is to be remembered for his reform of Hegelian dialectics and his aesthetic and logical studies. His historical studies are important (»Storia d'Europa nel secolo XIX and »Storia d'Italia dal 1871 al 1915 , etc.) in which he emphasises the liberal development in Europe before the war in polemics with the "crisis" of post-war totalitarian systems.Croce

6) Tortora, Enzo - (Genoa 1928 - Milan 1988) Journalist and famous television MC, arrested for drug pushing. Elected to the European Parliament in 1984 on the Radical ticket, he underwent a famous trial in which he was convicted, only to be absolved on appeal. This occasion became the symbol of the Radicals' most important campaign for the reform of justice.Tortora

7) Celentano, Adriano - An Italian pop music and film star.