I. THE CONGRESS IN BUDAPEST

THE HOPE FOR A SPRINGTIME OF DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM

ABSTRACT: In the first part of his report presented at the Congress in Budapest, First Radical Party Secretary Sergio Stanzani comments favourably on the attitude of the Hungarian authorities who, unlike the Yugoslavian ones, authorised the Radical Congress to be held in their country: this is the proof that the iron curtain has fallen in Hungary.

(35th Congress of the Radical Party, Budapest April 22-26, 1989)

When we decided a year ago at the Bologna Congress that the first trans-national Congress of the Radical Party would be held outside Italy, we could never have imagined that it would be possible to hold it here in Budapest.

I want to acknowledge this extraordinary fact with sincere pleasure: the fact that the announcement - hopefully this time not ephemeral and a tragic illusion - of a new springtime of freedom and democracy and the opening of the Hungarian state and Communist Party to cultural, political and social pluralism and the need of reconstructing a constitutional state, has allowed ours of all parties to meet here in Budapest, ours which many years ago had chosen to be the party of democracy and non-violence, of conscientious objection and human rights, the party of the refuzniks and the right to life and liberty.

We have chosen to be a trans-national party, in form and organisational structure as well. A party whose experience and history has been exclusively Italian, but which never defined itself as Italian and which had members and leaders - even a secretary - who were not Italian, has today become in little more than a year a party of Italians and Hungarians, of Spaniards and Slovenes, of Portuguese and Catalans, of Sardinians and Romanians, of Belgians and Basques, of Serbs and Croats, of Frenchmen and Poles of Bourkinabés and Israelis, of Turks and Senegalese.

We are all bound to our respective homelands, languages, cultures, but we also want to acquire a communal homeland, identify ourselves - beyond our borders - with a homeland of communal values and ideals: a higher homeland in which a new communal law, a new law of and for peoples can be affirmed.

Therefore we find ourselves at home here in Budapest, we find ourselves in our homeland. And for very good reasons. For if in the events of 1956 our Magyar brothers received a wound which remained unhealed for a long time in their lives and history, those same events left in the consciences and memory of us all a wound that was unhealed. Those tanks which, under the pretence of fighting a counter-revolution, suffocated in blood and repression the free choice of a people, of its institutions, of the Hungarian Communist Party itself, represented schism and deepened the cleft between power and reason, between Socialism and freedom.

Today we harbor this hope: that the iron curtain, which has now fallen, not only on the scene of our Congress but also in the consciences and the will of the Hungarian people and its institutions, may fall for good everywhere it has separated the two Europes and that that schism may happily reunite under the aegis of democracy.

But we also express the hope, Hungarian friends and brothers, that this Budapest spring which has brought back democracy to your country and to Socialism, may spread beyond your borders into all parts of Europe, to strengthen and renew the tired and stiffened practising democracies of the West, whose fault is to close themselves up alone in order to defend and manage a material well-being that threatens turning out to be an illusion.

Therefore we offer our thanks to the political and governmental authorities of the Peoples Republic of Hungary for allowing us, consistent with the recent direction and decisions they have taken, to hold here in Budapest the Congress of a trans-national and non-Communist party.

We are here bearing all our flags. They are the flags of lay tolerance, and Gandhian non-violence, of liberal and libertarian Socialism, of relentless democracy and liberal guarantees.

But we are also here with great and true humility. We are the protagonists of a tragic century - I am of an age which has destined me personally and directly to know the tragic finale of Fascism and Nazism as well as, indirectly, that of Stalinism - which allows us to know how delicate and difficult are the roads of reform and freedom. Thus, we are not here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to compare our difficult search and our experience with yours. We are not even here presuming to offer you help. On the contrary, we are here to ask help of you. The success and progress of your spring is truly essential for all of us, for Europe and the world.

Thus we only say to you that our hopes are your hopes and our problems yours. We know that your efforts are taking place in a situation fragile as crystal, but we hope that the sad experiences of the past will help render your attempts, like crystal, hard and resistant.

I thank all those who have accepted to participate in this Congress, those coming from official political institutions or representing the various expressions of political, cultural and social pluralism. I thank as well all those who have come from Poland and Czechoslovakia, from Russia and Yugoslavia and who can for the first time - in a single forum - speak out and compare their various problems and their common hopes.