ABSTRACT: The USSR is proclaiming "glasnost". Liberal political culture holds that democracy must be as clear as glass. For the Radical Party, transparency and financial transparency first and foremost, is not a hope for the future or an empty proclamation, but a constant commitment, the very condition for its existence. It would never have been possible in fact, to conceive and practice radical diversity under the financial aegis of this or that economic or political lobby. Strict self-financing of Radical activities on the part of the members is therefore primarily a political rather than a moral need. Radical party membership has its price, it is expensive, because Radical politics are worth a great deal. But that is not all. The price of the transnational project seems prohibitive: merely to speak, write and communicate in eight languages requires resources which today we do not possess. We must gear ourselves to e precise alternative which does not allow for short cuts: we must find the best shareholder

s possible to finance the Radical undertaking, or we shall have to wind it up.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

In August 1986, on the Italian beaches, under the umbrellas, in the camp sites, the usual relaxing little holiday melodies could not be heard emanating from the holidaymakers' transistor radios: instead, there was a spate of insults, declarations of hatred and love, a stream of poetry and curses.

A private radio station was broadcasting non-stop the live opinions, which were usually obscenities, of thousands of people who had been given the chance to air their views freely. For 24 hours every day, day and night this incredible phenomenon upset millions of Italians who discovered in this torrent of words a side of Italy they had wanted to remove, but by which they were fascinated because it revealed the true level of the violence in our society in which we are all participants. It was Radio Radicale, the Radical Party's radio, the most austere, the most specialised and listened to by all those involved in politics and the world of journalism. The radio was broadcasting live, and in an integral version the sittings of the Italian Parliament, congresses of all the political parties and major trials. In the face of its financial difficulties, before being forced to irrevocable closure, it had in fact interrupted its programme and invited listeners to intervene in its financial crisis.

With the same criterion of the integrality of information which it had applied until then to Italian political life, it was now gathering and transmitting without cuts or censorship the voices of whoever dialled its numbers. In an unforeseen crescendo thousands of unknown people were grabbing this opportunity to free themselves of their ghosts, and release their own pent up frustration.

The police interrupted the broadcast, but Radio Radicale was saved. The greatest exponents of culture and politics actually mobilised themselves to prevent the closure of a radio station able to bring to the light, in the most alarming and worrying way, a society's deep-seated unease. A radio, actually, which broadcast real information, which did not manipulate reality.

This event, which was splashed across the front pages of the Italian newspapers and with which all the principle means of European information were concerned, was one of the many episodes of the daily life of the Radical Party, which differently from all the other parties, had never wanted its existence and its options to be conditioned by public financing and the income from power structures and infrastructures. On the contrary, it had always gambled on the intelligence and generosity of the common people, and had always found the necessary conviction to ask, even of the poorest oldage pensioner, to deprive himself of the necessary, and not of the superfluous.

A party that was able to defend its poverty and mendicity with pride; that in the course of its existence had never been involved in the corrupt practices or bribery which pollute political life all over the world.

This was the element of strength and freedom which enabled the Radical Party to denounce the worst scandals of political life. In the hardest moments of its existence, it never took shortcuts, it did not accept compromises but put its own existence at stake: "You choose it or you lose it".

With this dramatic alternative, the Radical Party turned to public opinion in 1987 entrusting to the people the responsibility for deciding whether to wind up or relaunch its hopes and battles. With only three thousand members, mostly Italian, it could not delude itself or others that it would be able to cope with the great challenges of our time: the war against extermination by hunger, political totalitarianism, the illicit drug trade. Overcoming the censorship of the mass media, it succeeded in communicating this to many, and once again, worked a miracle: in five months it collected more than 19 thousand enrolments.

It was not only a struggle for its own survival but a moralising action and a proposal addressed to all political forces. When in 1974 the Italian Parliament decided in the space of a few hours, in the most absolute secrecy and silence, with the complicity of the media, to grant the parties hundreds of billions of contributions, a very harsh campaign of denouncement began, which ended four years later in the referendum for the abrogation of the law for the public financing of parties.

Although it was the sole supporter of the abrogation against all the other parties, it gained more than 45% of the consensus.

Even if the law was not abrogated, this unforeseen and clamorous result, which revealed the existence of an Italy unwilling to put up with party arrogance, produced a great uprising against the impunity which had always been assured to the corrupt politicians at the head of the government.

A first effect was chasing the President of the Republic, Giovanni Leone out of office: he had been heavily involved in the Lockheed scandal, and the honest Sandro Pertini was elected to this post of greatest responsibility to the State.

But even the Radical Party had to come to terms with the "temptation of power" when it entered the institutions, the Parliament, for the first time in 1976. It had thus to face the problem of whether or not to accept the state financing of parties against which it had been fighting.

The slim structure of the Party, which did not include more than twenty people and was based exclusively on volunteers, would have been overwhelmed. Above all, that typical capacity of voluntary organisations to gather hundreds of citizens in single political campaigns, would have been overwhelmed. This characteristic of the Radical Party had made it possible to collect the signatures necessary to hold the popular referendums that Italian law, through particularly severe regulation, wanted to reserve for large mass organisations only: 500.000 signatures written and authenticated in the presence of a notary or a judicial official, which had to be collected and delivered together with the electoral certificates of each signatory, within three months.

Thanks to the militant and unremunerated work of thousands of people, as from 1975, the Radical Party promoted 25 popular referendums. The acceptance of State financing would also have changed the characteristic feature of the Radical Party: from being a party in the service of exercising direct democracy through citizens who associate freely in the pursuit of political objectives and initiatives to finance their own activities, it would have become a party of state employees inevitably tending towards the conservation of their own power and positions. The Party chose however, not to use the State funds, and only after the outcome of the referendum, to avoid that this money being redistributed among opposing parties, the Congress decided not to use it for the Party's functioning but exclusively for alternatives in the interest of the public. This is how Radio Radical was born, conceived as the means of supplementing the disinformation of the State television and radio broadcasts controlled by the parties

currently in power. A radio to serve all the political forces and all the movements, which would not resort to any political discrimination, and which through the use of unabridged, live broadcasts of the work of the representative bodies, would permit citizens to control the behaviour of those elected.

It was one way to restore to all citizens at least partially, through the precious possession of information, that public money which had been so unjustly taken from them.

Today, an even tougher challenge awaits the Radical Party: its transformation into a transnational political entity.

We have already spoken, in this small publication, of the ideal motives for this decision and of the difficulties inherent in its realisation. The financial problem is not the least of these. It is enough to think of the cost of translation and printing in four, sometimes in 12 languages; of simultaneous translation for congresses and meetings. The telephone bills reach dizzy heights. But we will even deal with this challenge.

Important things are expensive. And the Radical Party cannot allow itself to stand idle, to administer what it has obtained: "Forget great triumphs immediately", the great writer Pierpaolo Pasolini told us, "and continue unperturbed, obstinate, eternally contrary, to strive, to want, to identify yourselves with the different, to scandalize, and to curse and swear..."

Yet again we are "condemned" by our history and our political morality to remain faithful to the option which has guaranteed the Radical Party's success: first and foremost to put ourselves in the citizens' hands and leave them to decide to contribute to our struggles with their own work and money.

As always, we must steel ourselves to a precise alternative which allows no shortcuts: finding enough who are willing to invest in the transnational Radical undertaking - or closure.

We are entrusting the hope of meeting those who will invest in this new Radical adventure to this little publication, translated into 12 languages, those pioneers who feel the urgent need to pass over narrow national frontiers to reach new frontiers of freedom and rights.