ABSTRACT: Pannella summarises the history of the PR, recalling the extraordinary results it has achieved. But now the Radical Party is no longer the adequate tool for the new political tasks. The party-power political system is in crisis, not only in Italy, but the PR as such is not capable of provoking political reform. In order to advance, to be able to construct another political tool a break in the life of the party is necessary "because that segment of the theory of method, that party is dead".

Speech of Marco Pannella to the PR Federal Council at Bohinj (January 2-6, 1989)

--------------

I think that all the speeches given this evening, and many others since the beginning of the Federal Council (including the discourse one that we had for about an hour tonight - this hasn't happened to me for a long time - among the leadership group) have been discourses in which we spoke about everything. And I don't mean this in the proverbial sense which says that "speaking of everything is speaking of nothing". The number of problems is practically infinite, but so are the ideas and the goals. Every time we meet everyone is carrying his own lantern for shedding light on many aspects of the situation.

During Roberto's speech, however, I made great efforts to grasp what he finally called the "central problem". What is it? I don't know because he defined so many problems and then went on to say that they were wrong, false, marginal, whereas they seemed serious to me while he was expounding them. It seems to me that he said the problem was to urgently define the area of penetration, of action, for example. This is surely correct. Now you tell me that this was not so and hence I repeat - I said it to Francesco, and it is not often that I ask for support from Francesco - I did not manage to understand and yet I followed your discourse in its entirety. Very often the things that Roberto brought up - up until he said "no" - seemed to me serious, seemed important to have received one's attention. One thing which perhaps embarrassed me a little is that inasmuch as it is also a question of "tone", and each of us has his own, Roberto always ends up always more by taking a decisive tone... If you say "I am ve

ry undecided", you say it with a tone so decisive that gives me the impression you know exactly what you want. Lucky Roberto! He is always convinced of something. Even if the thing he is very convinced of is that he doesn't know what to do.

For Roberto to say "that is a quibble, that is marginal" is perhaps the demonstration that we have two slightly opposite approaches: I have often been reproached (during the time of Ercolessi and Ramadori) of immediately putting the spotlight on the criticisms, on the diverse proposals, on the things that may seem the most dangerous but also the most outlandish, or perhaps - in quotation marks - the most stupid because automatically I tend to deny that they are as stupid as they seem. How many times have you accused me of fighting windmills! Or to set myself stubbornly against something. When one speaks of a "Radical project" - and Roberto has spoken of projects - I am always seriously embarrassed.

What I believe I understand today is that one thing marked us in these twenty years: in our own way, a bit like soldiers of fortune, of good fortune, we have from time to time run to defend frontiers which seemed to be and were undefended, and in general we ran to those places where we rightly thought that the great majority and the common sense of the people were in agreement about the right direction; and that political alienation, the split between power and reason, between reasoning and making decrees on the part of the leaders, or of the culturally assimilated ones, had become untenable and, in any case, otherwise uselessly bearable.

In 1975, we and I held a hunger strike, at first still on a strictly personal level - a hunger strike without limits in order to ensure that eight laws either be approved or rejected. Actually, Roberto, what was it those eight things had in common? Only the scandalous fact that they were things that had become the property of our consciences, even the consciences of politicians, certainly the consciences of the great popular majority, in human but not political terms, and that they were there, ripe for being received. They weren't in the least "progressive". It was their concept of family law! But after seven years they still had not managed to vote on it and we said: "this family law, inadequate as it still is (we aren't in the Chamber, we cannot improve it), we want it put to a vote!". We want a debate on abortion to begin! We went to the Communists with this one request. When Enrico Berlinguer (1) understood this the Communist Party took a great leap. Until that day they had said that abortion was a

problem of the middle and lower middle class which separated the sensibilities of the Catholic masses from the Communist ones. Once he understood he accepted the idea; he fell, as it were, into the trap. And that is when everything began to get through... abortion, the eighteen-year-old vote, the first referendum on drugs; I don't remember it all... but everything was there. Thus the unifying element was this feeling of the urgent possibility of overcoming the division between power and a widely diffused need for which power had been trying to find its solution. So that this divorce between reasonableness - between reasonable and necessary promises - and power should be overcome.

We acted against the immense waste of power which continued in not perceiving that objective urgency on which it could have found a consensus with 80-90% of the people if properly consulted.

Like Gandhi, who also had a Socratic, maieutic method, which in reality was possible because he gathered things in which the common human conscience of a totally illiterate seventy-year-old and a progressive intellectual could meet.

"A black man cannot travel first class in South Africa, even if he is a lawyer, even if he is very rich"... banal things which, in effect, were totems that could not be touched, the political class was unanimous in not touching them and in consequence people experienced these things like a destiny, but certainly without thinking it was just: if the grandchild questioned his grandfather in a somewhat traditional style, surely the grandfather...

That is what we have done at bottom. In encountering the violence of omission, the violence of commission typical of the society in which we live. Without apparent connections. We have opened those fronts and we have fought those battles. The political society - or better, power - was not ready for this kind of social initiative, and for a certain number of years this lack of preparation and the contradictions of a mass media practising gross censorship which, however, still respected old norms whereby a boss like Bernabei - the absolute master of the Italian State Radio, a Christian Democrat - gave in at the very moment when one managed to catch him out and even asked him to make amends for the information that had been denied to the citizens. Within two, three, four years the breach was filled... too much so! And the reaction led to what I had said: in Italy, I told our non-Italian comrades, the way to impose aberrations on Italian society that no one would have ever thought could be imposed is now

by way of our victories, victories such as the justice referendum which become the occasion for letting through things that are tremendously reactionary in comparison with the past and which otherwise no one would have ever thought of proposing.

The other characteristic, unique and fundamental, it seems to me was the joining of these things into one and - I am quoting myself after more than twenty years on these things - our statute.

We have what a kind of political jargon of the intellectual left calls a segment of method theory which is so simple and strong that it is the true explanation of the miracle which allows a thousand or a hundred people to produce immense things or to be immensely more creative and productive than others by sweeping away specious democratic attitudes for the essence of democracy. By indicating that one "joins every 12 months", for one programme therefore; and after joining for that programme, what a debate! What a democratic event! By God, what a pre-congressional debate! At the time you had federal councils (then called national councils) every two months and a special congress every two years, so that we held three congresses in 24 months! It is evident that our need still to discuss things among ourselves was the instinctive democracy which is the death of democracy. It is the damnable continental concept of a multi-party proportional kind of democracy where one associates in order to be represented a

nd not for governing something, for governing a choice and bringing it about.

The third and last characteristic - but this I must add is purely historical and something which Baget Bozzo (2) very clearly and directly described, as did Pasolini (3) even more clearly but indirectly - is the characteristic by which the PR, in the integrity of its candid way of saying "why not?" or "why this?", and therefore "no" or "yes" on everything became something which supplicated the Catholic Church in Italy to be always attentive to the things of the body: suffering, imprisonment and in its own way to divorce, love, abortion, sex. The Catholic Church, which was the only culturally equipped force for coping with these problems through its millenary power due to its having already gone through the crises of the centuries, of a couple of millennia.

All of this was rightly indicated as being at the core of the problems that each of us was and is in danger of experiencing, of experiencing as a destiny, a fate or whatever natural diversity containing the mortality of each individual, that is to say, the creative part in its desire for being and which is in fact annulled first on the individual and then the social level by a kind of sociology of morals and the characteristics of every individual ("that fellow is a fairy", "that other one is not a fairy", "that one is nuts", "that other one is not nuts", "that one is black" and "that other one is white", "that one is from the North" and "that other one from the South", "that one is a Christian Democrat and that other one isn't"). All this represents the death not of ideologies but of ideas and above all of morality as a value and an attribute of everyone, possibly missing but certainly an attribute, which can be seconded or killed by the law, the book, by the etc., etc....

Enough! Here is where I stop.

It is also true that at a certain point I said "now we have to move from civil rights, since we are non-violent, to human rights", and so for five months I thought about fasting, about a hunger and thirst strike... hunger and thirst must be relative to hunger and thirst. And in fact we went through that period.

And then other ones, more democratic and non-violent ones. But today, I think, there is only one problem: we are totally buried in the inner backsliding of each of us, within the party and the social body, by the incredible number of intelligent people, by the projects that by now we are secreting continually. One ought to say we are pissing them continually, but that wouldn't be correct, because in reality we are secreting them.

We encounter the problem of the political system, the party-power system, and immediately our education sets us going, we secrete an analysis of the two societies a few years before Dahrendorff, many years before. We fish up again the question that allows us to say today: "be careful, it would be a splendid tactic too, but it is not the truth". I said so to the head of state in Ouagadougou, I said it in Belgrade, I have been saying it around here: we have the good luck to be able eventually to propose not that someone ought to reform himself on the model of someone else, but at bottom to shoot as enemies at monopartyism, at proportional multi-partyism, in order finally to propose the extension of and the definitive crossing of the English Channel, to the classical conception of democracy and the democratic electoral systems. Even while knowing perfectly well that the electoral system per se is neither good or bad, is neither democratic or non-democratic. Today we can say two things in the midst of the s

pring of the Soviet empire or in all the states of the ex Soviet empire: "Watch out, do not create a national party (which they are doing) and do not create reforms that go from a single-party system to a multi-party proportional system; create one which is anchored to individual rights, legislate little or no public law and, above all, limit yourselves to ensuring that the rules of the game you choose tends towards a bi-party system to avoid bi-polarity".

Our approach, our history, the good and bad fortune we have had have given us a capacity of response and a capacity to excite demands that to my knowledge does not exist in any other form of association, not only among the parties but not even in the trilaterals, not even in the Club of Rome today. There is nothing, because everything that the Clubs of Dakar, Brandt, etc., etc. secrete is putrid even before it sees the light of day, because it is destined to be filed away, it is a waste of grey matter.

When we ask such questions as will evoke a reply from the very young military organisation of Burkina Faso, from President Campaoré so that when I tell him "dammit, you've killed the seven", he replies: "After the things we said to each other in the spring, I have not killed the soldiers that could have been killed flagrantly, because I will use it as an occasion for setting back up the Court of Assizes" - in this case we must be aware that we are evoking a reply from a very great intelligence, a very great impertinence: "I am beginning to reconstruct a structured, organised legal system".

And our political wisdom for this year? It's making headway: the DP [Proletarian Democracy], the Greens, the Social Democrats, Liberals, Republicans, even the Socialists... (we know it went into crisis), the democratic-Christian world, the stupidly lucid things that De Mita [DC leader, ed.] incredibly repeats to our representatives. "Ah, certainly, if it depended on me!" - great esteem! but certainly with stupid sincerity and uselessness... And then Martinazzoli, the other things...

In short, we are at the centre of the political situation of the Palazzo (4) without therefore having abandoned a position very open to the winds blowing in from the streets, the squares, the open air.

We have set up and, I think, acquired in the right way the critical approach for holding up our Radical rejection of nuclear energy but without making of it a taboo: who would want to exclude the possibility that safe nuclear energy may one day be available? I hope it may one day come to pass, even if I don't believe in it, above all at a time when it is already amply clear that with regard to the hot-house effect and the ozone hole the problem is not one of nuclear energy but of all the other kinds of energy we burn.

We are dying of reason, of good reasons, and everything is clear. Not only that, but if we are distracted for as much as five months from the problems of the prisons, great steps backwards are taken on the level of life and conditions there. For two years we fail to speak of extermination from hunger in the world and that unfortunate pope, it is as if he didn't speak of it any more, as if it had ceased to exist. Surely he speaks of it, but the papers don't report it.

We are flooded with election proposals from all sides. What is the problem? There is only one problem: the crisis of political society and the institutions in the world of today is due not to a lack of intelligence, not to a lack of rigor, imagination and also at bottom resources such as ours, but to that which Lenin tried to resolve and resolved very badly.

We have exhausted the topicality of that segment of method theory, we are the enterprise that has brought respect in the most incredible way to the cost-profit relationship. Five hundred of us have accomplished what a million and a half others with a great tradition have not accomplished, and this is because we have grasped the essentials of living with each other and of organising ourselves and doing this in the face of anger, of desperation and of fashion.

This tool, as I have been saying for years, this utensil, is no longer suitable. Already in 1980 we had excluded forever the presence of the party in city governments, and this we owe to party Secretary [Giuseppe] Rippa. Then, all together, we approved the preamble and that decision and theorised on it. The next year we theorised - and this is surely the secret of the future - the electoral strike as the exercise of a right to be organised and for the first time to some extent organised; and then we foresaw the consumers' strike and perhaps that of the user of information. We had decided not to run, and then we did run in order to better present the campaign for the electoral strike. Already four years after we got into the Italian Parliament we, or some of us, that is almost all of us with different kinds of consciences - but some with very clear ideas from this point of view - worked to get out of the institutions gradually, but above all for the Radicals to emerge from that larva which, through havin

g entered into the institutions had become our habitation in which we were chrysalises... Every year, comrades.

When Roberto says "there is strategy..." I think about it and I must say with much serenity, but also with the regret of convinced serenity, that this, unfortunately, is not the problem. Would that it were. There would be less suffering. We and I have been preparing for what I could do to make the chrysalis emerge from within the political system, to change it and revolutionise it, also by means of the dynamics, the energies that are released when the chrysalis emerges from the cocoon. In this last year, please indulge me - and here is where we get to Gianfranco - this last year, month after month for nine months, we have been prudently constructing, slowly, decisively a project which has enormously increased our possibilities, has involved us in that business of the EEC commissioner and has given us that extraordinary sense that we are not isolated in our conscience, our sensibility, that these are shared by almost everyone (crossing considerations of age, cultures, parties, antipathies, the Giorgio Bo

ccas (5)).

By the way, I received a note from Franco Bonifacio - I mention it in order to thank him - who asks: "Why do you consider me an enemy?". It is true. Ever since Bonifacio has been presiding judge of the Constitutional Court he has been very attentive. We have made progress.

The party secretary too has cleared up for us a marginal but very substantial misunderstanding regarding this whole year in which we have miraculously progressed. Why did we hold the Catania event? We did it in the attempt to create the premises to determine, perhaps by June when many Italian municipal elections will be held, if we will, the disappearance not only of the Radical Party but hopefully many other parties as such.

This is a leap in quality that we have before us. We go from the disappearance of the party (and we are the only ones who might want to remain, but who instead are the first to remove ourselves) because it is not as Radicals but, if anything also as Radicals - how often have I repeated it this year that we can only be Radicals as well in order to realise a certain fulfilment of our civil life in a city, a region, and hopefully in a nation. When in fact I arrived at Trent, and I am sorry that Franca Berger is not here, and I heard that "the Radicals support the Green candidates", I immediately declared publicly "that is a lot of nonsense!": "I fight, but it is not the Radicals - this is not true - support the Green candidates and perhaps Franca Berger, but some Radicals who work in support of this non-party formula". In Catania it was all the Radicals, the whole chiefs-of-staff of the party. And still we told the people "not as Radicals, not only as the Radical Party, but also as Radicals".

Perhaps we have managed to go this whole road and, for my party, I have managed it. For me, this is a bit the tragedy of this party, a minor one, but a tragedy for all that: did we decide last February to run in the national and European elections? For me quite other things were decided, and from tomorrow on I shall begin to think of getting on the move, of finding greater thrust for Catania, for the regional elections, for the trans-party question, including the Italian one. I spent four months convincing the majority of the group of leaders that there were no more dual-memberships. Before we had two pears, now we have a pear and an apple, so it is no longer a dual membership: one is also a Radical, the things cannot be added together.

In March I stumbled: we must always join the trans-party and the trans-national aspects, otherwise you can't understand a damn thing! And this is a convergent way to try reaching, by means of simplifying the number of lists of candidates, the result we want to reach through legislative reform which is that of two, three or four parties as four different forces. But does this strike you, comrades, as a small accomplishment for nine months?

And finally, Giovanni's gesture: only eight months ago if a Radical had taken out membership in the PSDI [Social Democratic Party], he would have been thought a clown... instead his act was immediately understood and followed with sympathy, with strength. Something will surely happen within the PSDI!

We have reached the point where we do not have useless discussions that waste time. We are not running in either the European or national elections as the Radical Party, as Radicals - we are not running! We will do what we do, either nothing or something eventually also as Radicals, as people. And instead, they say that within sixty days at most one must decide if one is running in the European elections. If we now begin again to say "it is possible", "it isn't possible", "but in this way the trans-national party will really die, let's make a little exception"... We have explained it, I thought it was all clear: when last summer - or rather last spring - I spoke with La Malfa [Giorgio, Secretary of the PRI - Italian Republican Party] who spoke of an alliance, I said "no, the more lists of candidates the better": we cannot present ourselves as a party... but the DP [Proletarian Democrats] by themselves, the Greens by themselves. We will see if there are enough dissenting Radicals and Greens to form anoth

er list. We must not allow the electoral reforms to pass that everyone, everyone would have accepted.

But, I say, these are things that we all did as a group; can I be the only one who sees the connections among them?

How many choices do we have? We finally help D'Amato make a united pensioners list because 2,000 - 3,000 votes are guaranteed if they are united. D'Amato is already a deputy in the Chamber and can tell the others that disunited we lose. I could have fun making up anti-prohibition lists, naturally putting very few Radicals on them, because here there is a hope of winning another 300,000 votes... Keep an eye out this time for the Sardinian Action Party... if there is nothing else to do. And who says that a few of us don't have the right to run and win as candidates of the PRI, the PSDI, the PLI [Liberal Party] under certain conditions...? You say [referring to Donvito who interrupts him, ed.] that there is a knife fight going on. Good. I tell you that in some Italian cities where we had no knife fights with foreign countries or anything, our young leaders slaughtered the biggest leaders of the lay parties, for example, slaughtered them even though they had billions and billions and other things. So? They

slaughtered them having a fifth or having the same number of votes as candidates lists. There is an opinion vote in the European elections. Is this something we should organise as a party? No! This I refuse to do! I threw out that bait after having primarily talked it over with the others. The Daddy and Mummy party... How many Radicals took dual party membership with conviction? Everyone has felt the party to be a daddy and mummy. I have had no problems because it was my luck that Bettino Craxi [Socialist Party secretary] didn't want to give me that party card. Furthermore now there are no incompatibilities... Before when you had a dual party membership, when the elections came you had to make up your mind. Isn't that so?

The problem is that of the tool, the utensil. If at the time I began to insist that we should abandon the utensil we had done so, probably we would by now have created five other ones by lay methods. But institutional stupidity, into which I also fall... Yes, we have obtained a little legislation, we have done something. But is this enough to live on? Deputy or not, senator or not, under-secretary or not, minister... be patient! On the other problems brought up I would need to speak for just as long as I have taken to try explaining... But one thing is sure, if every time we make a decision, if the only important problem is to put it into discussion again, it is taken for granted that one must begin discussing again... bloody hell! So, while waiting for these [European elections, ed.] not a damn thing has been done of the things that people who are also Radicals could have done since they were something more than only Radicals.

Now of course I get worked up, I know that one must wait for the time to be ripe, that Catania has taken place, that I have already mentioned Reggio Calabria, that I have already mentioned the other things...

The tool doesn't work. I have not conceived the question of public financing as Sergio has. Sergio has said it for the reasons he has explained to us, I have grasped it for other reasons. Don't bull shit each other, don't do it at all, but quit lying about yourselves, about each of us! That can go on very well for a year, for two, three, four or five; there were autonomous subjects, and that is what they really were; there was the separateness of the group and those others. But now we ourselves have had to accept an electoral law which made Radical Radio a party organ, so that it stopped being a separate subject and we give it money as a party organ, by God! We have had to accept a law different from what they told us when it was presented, because in reality it was financing of quite another sort - a disgusting publishing law, but let it go! Don't bull shit each other: if the tool is to be kept operative it means using direct and indirect public financing! Am I being too hasty? I don't think I am!

At this point I have said that the party secretary has acted like an honest man in telling us what he has. And if he has said it to provoke us or not, I don't give a damn! Today one can say to Montanelli (6) "you who today talk about an electoral strike, go the devil! Because you always wrote all the parts, and when there was a battle you didn't tolerate it". Certainly today one can speak of the other areas, and certainly here reflection would begin on the trans-national one. This is true, but then we ought to draw the consequences of it and remember that then perhaps I was no so dumb as you all thought when I seemed to exaggerate in my presentation of the country's democratic problems, of the certainty of legality as the reason of our dissolving.

Now you begin to understand that in reality it may be more possible to fight for democracy in a country like Yugoslavia - and maybe in Burkina Faso - than in countries that have "achieved democracy" where the organisation of the first estate has now totally nullified the possibility of democratic struggle. And this is an historical crisis. If we go ahead with the trans-national action, for me and the party France will exist only as an object, as a place to be occupied. France is certainly the most unconsciously chauvinistic of European countries, the most turned in on itself, the most inaccessible to the great debates and vaccinated against the least rigor and integrity. Whereas here words have their value as words, just as in Spain they did for a certain time... It is possible that thousands of members will come from here, but I repeat again that we are building a new party. I have said it other times: we are building a new party and today is the day after. You will have a moment's interruption, but yo

u will have it because that segment of method theory, that party is dead.

It doesn't exist and it will go on like that. And then, we don't give a damn about differing sensibilities, about the differing love of each of us, the Baget Bozzo kind of ideas or perhaps the Galli della Loggia (7) ones. A short break in continuity is needed and we have to say "we are another party", the old one has had its day and it was great.

Self-financing - don't make me laugh... The seriousness of Protestants, the seriousness of rigorous people is to give money to their church and so to their own activities, and that will happen, it must, and so we make an appeal for it. But if we had conducted more knowledgeably our actions of the last eight or nine months, we would not only have brought about the new trans-national party, we would also have brought about in Italy the trans-party party. If we win in the European elections with complete respect for last year's motion - never the emblem of our party or its equivalent in either the national or European elections - it we should win and then many of us, 10, 20, 30, 2 are elected to the European Parliament, if we are united, if we are not so far apart to be a house divided, then certainly we will have a larger group of Federalist and Radical non-violent deputies in the European Parliament and this without having needed to be elected on the same lists. And we could also have bargained for lots

of nice little lire, saying "if I'm elected"... Aside from the fact that if one constitutes a group in the European Parliament the money comes in one way or another, but what I am talking about is the reimbursements.

If one does well, the first conditions he makes are these... "excellent, but I want such and such an amount of election reimbursment money which it is probably right for me to have in advance". And so after the European elections we could really have Italian political leaders or political personnel joining the trans-national party rather than the Socialist International or the Christian Democratic one or that other one which no longer exists, because since they were comrades-in-arms during the European election battle, it is probable that they may be able to stand being together in trans-national party. And I am speaking about a level of many deputies or other people.

For the rest there is the Sahel, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Hungary and where the action is like Portugal, etc. The front where the battle has to be fought. But then one has to become very demanding. I don't believe we can allow ourselves the luxury at the next congress - considering what has happened to the councillor our Greek comrade or to the French - of making the error of electing comrades who maybe don't even want it just because, as Zevi said, right after the war in the Rome sections of the PCI [Communists, ed.] it was always necessary to run the comrade from Torpignattara [a working-class district of Rome, ed.] or that other farm hand from I don't remember where, etc....

We have to go to the congress to change things. What changing things means, remains to be seen. But I repeat, after which I will shut up, that there is one thing you must not ask of me because I cannot do it: don't ask me to go on without a break in continuity. One cannot straighten a dog's crooked legs. We can easily accept belonging to a new party, but it must be a different party, trans-national, trans-party... we must give up certain old things. We succeeded for fifteen years, then we stopped. For the rest, we are the ones who created self-financing, but just think of it!

That was something else, another life, another story. In those days we were a handful of Radicals, the body, the head, the hands that joined together. Was it something more wonderful? Don't even ask! It was what it was.

The salary, the lack of salary, the wife, the husband: everything was different. Better? No, for heaven's sake. I say it was what it was.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Berlinguer, Enrico (Sassari 1922 - Padua 1984) Italian politician. Deputy from 1968. Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1974 until his death. After the crisis and assassination of Allende he fathered the "historic compromise" that brought about the so-called "abstention-from-no-confidence majority", the apex of Togliatti's strategy for an organic agreement with the Christian Democrats. It was his project to bring about so-called "Eurocommunism", an attempt at Western reform which would not entirely reject the Communist experience.

2) Baget Bozzo, Gianni (Savona 1925) - Priest, political scientist, writer. Editoralist for the daily <> and the author of many successful books. PSI deputy in the European Parliament.

3) Pasolini, Pierpaolo (Bologna 1922 - Roma 1975) - Italian writer and film director. Novels (<>, 1955; <> 1959), poetry (<> 1957, etc.) theatre, cinema (<> 1961, <> 1964, etc.). But above all he was a formidable polemicist and moralist who denounced the misdeeds of the "middle class" and harshly criticised the Italian left for its incapacity. A sympathiser of the Radical Party concerning which he wrote beautifully, he was to deliver a speech at the party's Florence congress on the day he was killed.

4) Il Palazzo - 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.

5) Bocca, Giorgio (Cuneo 1920) - Italian journalist, contributor to the Rome daily <>, author of books and biographies, among them that of Palmiro Togliatti.

6) Montanelli, Indro (Fucecchio 1909) - Italian journalist and writer. Famous for his letters from Hungary in 1956. After many years working with <> he disagreed with its policies and left in 1974 to found <> whose respected managing editor he has been ever since. Has written successful books.

7) Galli della Loggia, Ernesto - Historian, university professor, journalist. Originally a Marxist he turned to liberalism and joined the Referendum List in the 1992 elections.