PREFACE

by Luigi Lotti

ABSTRACT: The preface to this book is by Luigi Lotti, a professor of Contemporary History at the faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Florence. The introductory note is by the author herself. The preface briefly describes the book's guidelines, presenting a concise history of the party and underscoring its merits in upholding civil rights, especially in the 1970-1980 period; after this date, the author contends, "when its values are triumphing", the party's impact gradually dims, even though the transition to the "transnational" dimension, with its "awareness of overcoming national boundaries", does represent a "projection into the European future". In the introductory note, Lorenza Ponzone in turn explains the documentary limits of the research as well as of the chronological divisions adopted. See text n. [5580] for the index and location of the various chapters in Agorà (ed).

(Lorenza Ponzone, THE RADICAL PARTY IN ITALIAN POLITICS, 1962-1989, Schena, January 1993)

After breaking away from the Italian Liberal Party following the conservative shift adopted by Malagodi's (1) leadership, the Liberal left refounded the radical party in 1956. For forty years and until World War I, this organization had represented the most advanced wing of the Italian democratic movements, and had played a key role in bringing about a series of fundamental innovations, such as universal suffrage in 1911-12. After the first world war, the radical party merged with Democrazia Sociale which was soon to be swept away, like every other party, by the advent of fascism. It had not re-emerged as a party after World War II.

The liberal left, namely the group hinging on "Il Mondo" and its editor Mario Pannunzio (2), had given new birth to the party with the precise purpose of preventing any confusion between the Italian liberal tradition and the conservatism of the Italian Liberal Party. In fact, what the group wanted to underline was the force of the liberal-progressivist tradition. It had been an important and significant experience, which had accompanied the gradual drift towards the centre-left versus the hostility of the liberal party. But the experience had been abruptly discontinued in the face of the violent repercussions of the controversy on the Piccardi affair. At that point, the radical party had dissolved itself.

The party's extreme wing, headed by Marco Pannella (3), had rescued and refounded it, at the same time setting different goals, spirit and organization. As much as the previous radical party had been a progressivist yet traditional party that aimed to engage in the Italian political struggle with progressivist intentions whose material expression were, nonetheless, the coalition and political and parliamentary prospects of the time - the cooperation with the P.S.I., the birth of the centre-left, the isolation of the P.C.I. - the new radical party placed itself in a totally new position, defining itself a "socialist, lay and libertarian" party and aiming at an all-out opposition to the D.C. and an aggregation of the entire left, including the P.C.I., for a strenuous defense of individual rights, antimilitarism, struggle against the Concordat, divorce, liberalization of abortion; all this was done on the basis of a fragile organization formed by a host of heterogeneous opposition groups.

This is the shape of the radical party of the last decades since 1962. At any rate, this is how it was until the past few years, when it started a transnational process in correspondence with the collapse of the communist regimes of centre-eastern Europe. But those were it characteristics between 1970 and 1980, when its activity and its role were most relevant, and far greater than its limited numerical and electoral size.

The original structure was clearly influenced by the fact that many of its new exponents had militated in university organizations, and by their exasperated lay propensity towards a peaceful relationship with the communist sectors. This explains the rejection of the centre-left, which was considered to conflict with the most important aims of the struggle against the D.C., and the rapprochement with the P.S.I.U.P. and the P.C.I. in the administrative elections of '66. This also explains, at a later stage - the early seventies - the fundamental isolation when the crisis of the centre-left lead to national solidarity rather than to an alternative to the D.C. Nonetheless, precisely its "thematic" approach soon showed the new radical party the path to follow. Not the sweeping prospect of an impossible coalition of all movements of the left against the D.C., considering the huge gap between republicans and socialists on the one hand, and communists on the other on domestic and especially international issues. The

fact of addressing specific problems on which the parties of the left - as well as other parties - agreed despite the opposition between government majority and opposition; or rather, they were driven - also and mainly at the urge of the radicals - to overcome their respective positions. Clearly this called for issues that were not to affect the linchpins of the opposite political choices: individual rights served this purpose more than anything else, and all the more so after '68, which, all classist forms of radicalization notwithstanding, also lead to a surge of single claims which had until then been misrecognized or restrained. The main problem the radicals aimed at for this line of cross-party initiatives was divorce.

Draft bills for the introduction of divorce in the Italian regulation had already been introduced during the second and third legislature. But they had never been voted. During the fourth legislature, a socialist M.P. called Loris Fortuna (4) had submitted a new project on which the radical party concentrated all its efforts also and especially by means of the Italian League for the institution of divorce (L.I.D.) (5), specially created in 1966. The project was not approved in that legislature, but in the following one (1968-72) the new unified Baslini-Fortuna project became a law after the approval of the Chamber in late November 1969 and of the Senate the following October. What followed is well-known. The D.C., in a position of isolation along with the M.S.I., has allowed the problem not to affect the delicate ties of the centre-left majority with a view to enacting the constitutional principle of the abrogating referendum. Ultraconservative Catholic sectors resorted to this instrument, and the consequenc

e was that Parliament was dissolved before its natural term in order to avoid a referendum. This was accompanied by a shift in the positions of the radical party, which initially opposed the referendum and then supported it to avoid a partial transformation of the bill in Parliament. Lastly, two years later, in June 1974, the first referendum in the history of the Italian republic took place, and was won by the pro-divorce front.

The campaign for divorce was both a cause and an exemplification of the radical party's fundamental characteristics: campaigning on a major social issue, and on the basis of this forcing the endorsement of opposite parties who were unwilling to tackle it of their own volition but unable to neglect it if forced to. Precisely thanks to this cross-party battle the party relied on specific bodies created each time to gather heterogeneous forces of supporters to the detriment of the party organization. Lastly, the discovery of the referendum as the innovative means of direct democracy and especially as a means of aggregation of single votes on single problems, overriding the power of the parties. The fundamental characteristics of the party are: the growing and then consolidated tendency not to focus on an electoral and parliamentary growth such as to propel the radical party into a daily pattern of parliamentary majorities (or even just regional or local), but on the contrary to make into a tool of promotion for

various opposing parties, and on a daily basis urge heterogeneous and momentary aggregations on contingent issues. Hence the lack of a stable organization, the scant attention to promoting enrolments (despite recurring campaigns to reach a minimum number of members), the scarce attention - compared to other parties - of the secretary, elected each time by frequent congresses with the specific aim of engaging in a given battle; the federative characteristic, whereby its members may also belong to other parties; the fact that congresses are open to all and unfiltered by local designations; a series of aspects that make it a different party in terms of aims and organization and which, for its daily administration, precisely owing to the organizational weakness, has highlighted the original Roman group lead by Pannella, whose leadership has always been a linchpin, regardless of the positions he has covered, and which has always been highly significant for the image of the party itself.

In the meanwhile, the party's endorsement of the referendum had opened up new opportunities of action, pushing the radical party in 1973 to promote eight referendums on the basis of an extensive interpretation of this institution. The radicals aimed not only at subjecting a newly passed bill to the popular vote, but also long-seated laws or articles of laws or codes. And this with the purpose of transforming the abrogative referendum into a new tool of normative planning to be submitted directly to the electorate. The party attacked the Lateran Pacts, or concordat marriages, the military set of rules and penal code, the journalists' association, the limits to the freedom of press and freedom of broadcasting, and a number of particularly repressive aspects of the penal code.

However the party missed the objective, failing to reach the required number of signatures. The fundamental reasons for this were the difficulties in carrying out an initiative in a position of isolation and without an involvement of the parties, both spontaneous and caused by the impossibility to distance themselves from other parties' initiatives in Parliament, as for abortion; also, the political situation was dominated by the crisis of the centre-left, but also by the prospect of national solidarity and therefore of the PCI's inclusion into a new vast coalition with the D.C. and the other parties of the centre-left. This was what the radical party was strenuously denying and which urged it to improve its relations with the P.S.I., which presented itself as a critical component of the new majority.

The end of the centre-left and the beginning of the stage of national solidarity coincided with the election of the first four radical members of Parliament (they will become 18 in 1979 and about eleven and thirteen in the subsequent decade). But even that small initial group underscored the radical party's institutional objectives, or rather, the combination of defense of civil rights and defense of the role of Parliament. Having entered Parliament with the precise purpose of supporting individual rights, they were especially active in defending the institutions, their role as representatives of the popular sovereignty versus the excessive power of the parties. Taking advantage also of the possibility to exert obstructionism opened up by the new rules of the Chamber in 1971, which all but provided for forms of dissociation of any group, the radicals upheld the role of Parliament versus the coalitions between a theoretic majority and a facade opposition, the interferences of economic and category potentates.

The radical party all the more opposed national solidarity, which it regarded as the the most recent evil accomplishment of a political line which exacerbated the aspiration of a large part of the progressivist electorate towards a renewal hinging on a global and common role of the entire left as an alternative to the D.C.

This bitter acknowledgment the party used to resume the initiatives to promote referendums, not just to attempt to coagulate the parties or at least the left-wing electorate, but to attack the new consociate alliance between the D.C. and the P.C.I.: thus were resumed the proposals advanced and then dropped in the previous years, with the extra one of repealing the Reale bill on terrorism and the one on party public financing. All this fell into eight referendums, of which only the last two were voted. Both referendums were rejected. Nonetheless they gave a clear indication in the case of the public financing to parties, with 43,6 in favour of the radical proposal and a growing mistrust of the electorate towards the political forces. Three years later, in 1981, a further referendum failed, jointly with the one promoted by anti-abortion sectors, leading the party to reconsider its prospects.

It is a fact that precisely when the consociate system surrendered to a first attempt to restore the traditional role of Parliament, and in any case when the problem of safeguarding the institutions and reforming them or their electoral mechanisms in order to better meet the needs of the electors', and when civil rights, human rights, have become a vital basis for any political formation, and the fundamental theme of any request within all countries at an international level, precisely then the radical party lost its incisiveness. When its values triumphed, its presence has become less continuous and effective than in the previous decade. Clearly the project of uniting the left seemed to dissolve into the future, as the possibility to materialize the aspirations to extend rights and to consolidate the democratic institutions appeared full of obstacles. But there are no doubts that the party also paid the price of a huge voluntary grass-roots voluntary mobilization to organize the referendums which soon faded

after the trial, all the more in that negative, without the fragile party organization being able to cope. Perhaps the change of issues, from world hunger to the recent transnational projection, are less likely to prompt grass-roots spontaneity. And yet precisely this theme contains an anticipation of the European future; the awareness of overcoming national limits, and that the political forces must not only lead to the unification of the countries of Europe, but also unite in the name of individual rights and of the rights of the peoples and the continental democratic institutions that must guarantee those rights.

This book aims to provide a first comprehensive reconstruction of this complex and peculiar story. There are already a series of documents on the radical party, written by the protagonists themselves or by scholars of party history or political sciences. But with this study, which originated as a thesis at the faculty of Political Sciences "Cesare Alfieri" of Florence, Lorenza Ponzone meant to trace the complex itinerary of the radical party, its difficult position as an anti-system party and at the same time as guarantor of the democratic institutions, strenuous supporter of civil rights while firmly rejecting violence, disorganized yet capable of reaching out to other, far bigger parties; with no ties to the political circumstances and thus alien to the daily parliamentary activities but as a consequence also capable of waging battles and suffering defeats without being overwhelmed by them; capable, above all, of being one step ahead in defending citizens' rights. It is an anomalous political force, which

the author reconstructs with passion yet clarity and critical spirit, on the basis of an extensive consultation of sources and a vast documentation. A party far more important and influential in terms of inner life and national projection than in its numerical force.

LUIGI LOTTI (*)

(*) Professor of Contemporary History at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Florence

Translator's notes

(1) MALAGODI GIOVANNI. (London 1904 - Rome 1991). Secretary of the Italian Liberal Party (PLI) from 1954 to 1972. Conservative.

(2) PANNUNZIO MARIO. (Lucca 1910 - Rome 1968). Italian journalist, liberal. Editor of the daily newspaper "Risorgimento Liberale" between 1943 and 1947, he then established (1949) the newsmagazine "Il Mondo", which he was editor of for seventeen years, making into an unchallenged example of modern European journalism. Member of the Italian Liberal party, he was one of the founders of the Radical party, which he contributed to dissolving when the centre-left was formed.

(3) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

(4) FORTUNA LORIS. (Breno 1924 - Udine 1985). Italian politician. In 1965, he sponsored the bill on divorce which was passed by Parliament after years of initiatives and campaigns carried out in cooperation with the Radical Party in 1970. He also sponsored bills on abortion and passive euthanasia (the latter was not approved). Minister of civil defence and community affairs.

(5) L.I.D. Italian League for Divorce. Established in 1965 by Marco Pannella, Mauro Mellini, Loris Fortuna (socialist deputy) and Antonio Baslini (liberal deputy); organized the forces which supported the introduction of the bill sponsored by the two parliamentarians, chiefly aiming at separated couples and those who needed to solve their family problems. It was instrumental in mobilizing the divorced and the militants who allowed for the introduction of the bill in Italy. It was the first example, in Italy, of an association created on specific civil rights issues.

It is related to the Radical Party on a federate basis.