ABSTRACT: There is much discussion on the extent to which proportionalism has favoured, in Germany, the fall of the Republic of Weimar and the advent of the Nazi regime. But is is beyond question that during the 4th Republic France was "drowning" in proportionalism when De Gaulle introduced a degree of presidentialism that operated radical changes. In Italy the crisis is the result of proportionalism. For decades, completely isolated, the radicals tried to "break" this "model". Not just for the historical reference to the Anglo-Saxon experience, but for the need, in a modern society, to have structures capable of allowing "rapid choices and guaranteeing equally efficient controls".

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 23 November 1993)

There is much discussion on the extent to which proportionalist parliamentarism favoured, in Germany, the fall of the Republic of Weimar and the advent of the Nazi regime in the thirties, much like what had happened a decade earlier in Italy with fascism. But it is beyond question that France during the 4th republic was gradually drowning in proportionalism until, with the crisis of Algeria, the 5th republic, presidentialism and the abolition of the proportional system, it indicated a model of democracy that was not the consolidated British one, but one that helped the country come out of its deadlock.

If Italy is in a serious crisis today, this is caused by the party system. And if the party system was able to dominate and consolidate itself for forty years until its last expression, the corruption scandal, this is caused by proportionalism, which has been the original structure and the mechanism of perpetuation for almost half a century. The constituent compromise that was reached at the first elective assembly from 1946 to 1948, especially by the Christian Democratic and Communist parties, was based on the premise that no party should have been strong enough to govern without restrictions, and that no party was to carry out an opposition without also interfering in the affairs of the government. Thus started the dominion of consociation. Its complement lay in the fact that the representatives of the people in Parliament were not to answer directly to their electors, but to the parties that had elected them. Proportionalism on the basis of the party lists was the "Magna Charta" of the regime; the parties

were the new principles; Parliament was simply the place where the decision taken elsewhere were officialized and a constant table of negotiation; the government was not to be sufficiently strong and independent as to do away with influences; and parliamentarians were to pay homage to their parties.

For decades the radicals carried out a solitary battle, gradually supported bu citizens and aiming to break this Italian "model": an omnivorous parliamentarism, a generalized proportionalism, and a pervasive consociativism. The indication of the Anglo-Saxon electoral system - the first-past-the post majority system - as the most adequate to reconstruct a democracy based on a direct relation between electors and elected representatives, with a distinction between majority and minority and generally speaking very few parties, bearers of major political decisions, was the fundamental idea suggested by the Radical Party for Italy as for the emerging East European democracies.

It is not only the experience of countries such as the United States and Great Britain, which, while with radically different institutional mechanisms, can both be said to originate from that model, to indicate such prospect as the only valid one of the future of democracy, but also the need to make rapid choices and to guarantee equally efficient controls in modern and economically, socially and civilly developed societies.