ABSTRACT: The Italian crisis: as the country experiences one of the most difficult moments in its entire history, the Italian people respond in an extraordinary way to the Radical Party's campaign for new members. They have acquired "hope", "trust", and "civil and political honesty" to deal also with the "state of emergency" in Italy.
(THE NEW PARTY, MARCH 1993)
The English newspaper "The Guardian" wrote that Europe is at least partly responsible for the crisis Italy is currently experiencing. Europe, in fact "has preferred, after 1945, a corrupt Italy rather than having to accept any form of Communism".
However correct this judgment might be, it does not excuse the Italian people from not having accepted their responsibilities. Italy itself is having to face one of the most difficult periods in its entire history, on account of the mistakes, the wrongdoings and the actual crimes of its entire ruling class. The country's leaders should have realized a long time ago that the Italian political system needed to be reformed from top to bottom, completely changing the structures, the laws and the behaviour born in 1945, all of which proved more and more inadequate as time passed. Instead, this ruling class wilfully and stubbornly chose to hang on to its privileges at all costs, which the commitments of the "Cold War" and the needs of a poor, under-developed economy justified less and less,and which the Italian people found more and more unacceptable and intolerable. It was enough for a small group of Milanese magistrates to twist the knife, by bringing to light a system founded on corruption, complicity and "kick
backs" within which politicians, entrepreneurs (and also members of the magistrature which is now making charges) operated hand in glove, to blow everything wide open.
When the tremendous scandal broke, the public was outraged. Quite a few people called for "instant" justice, for the guilty to be put to death, in the same way that Mussolini and the other Fascist leaders were massacred and hung by their feet in Milan's Piazza Loreto in 1945. Italians do not have the strength to revolt but there is nevertheless a widespread thirst for revolution, which is somewhat worse.
The fall of Bettino Craxi, the extremely powerful Socialist leader, and so many other exponents of his party, has completely destroyed one of the three pivots on which the equilibrium of the Italian political system rested. However, the Christian Democrat Party also finds itself in the eye of the hurricane and the Democratic Party of the Left has nothing to smile about, and even though the latter has not been under investigation in the bribes scandal, it has inherited several "skeletons in the cupboard" from the former Italian Communist Party (secret financing from the Soviet Union for example) and its leadership seems neither to possess the necessary political culture to perceive the "wind of change", nor to be equipped to lead the country. The "separatist" Northern League is evidently incapable of seeing things in a wide perspective.
And precisely when Italy is being rocked by such enormous difficulties, the Radical Party has achieved a resounding success by obtaining over 36,000 members, with many intellectuals, politicians, artists, etc., unexpectedly joining. Yet again, the Radicals have not only gone against the trend by refusing to panic and or to bury their heads in the sand, but are also seeking to reverse it by restoring the proper values and honesty to politics, and by appealing to the Italian people to accept their responsibilities and join the Radical Party to help us fight this battle. The act of becoming a member is as costly as it is responsible: the cost of joining the Radical Party in Italy is equal to $182, which is almost thirty times as much as the membership fee required by the other parties (whose leaders used to buy party cards by the dozen to obtain majorities in their assemblies, to the point that some of the people who "joined" their parties turned out to be dead, just like in "Dead Souls" by Gogol).
The Radicals took a big risk in setting themselves this challenge. Very few people, maybe no one, would have bet one cent on their winning. But Italy has been waiting a long time for something similar and people realized what they stood to gain. This was manifest in a sudden, and surprising, acceptance of responsibility - for the first time in years - by the mass media, for example. Marco Pannella or Emma Bonino only had to appear on TV with the telephone numbers of the Party written on cards hanging around their necks, and the sixty phones specially installed at our headquarters started to ring and continued to do so for hours. People were actually enthusiastic about forking out a considerable sum to join the Radical Party. All things considered, they wanted to "acquire" at least a minimum of clean operating, of hope and trust, and of civil and political honesty.
