Word: bettino
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...Communists did relatively better, falling only from 30.4% to 29.9%. Some of the lost votes went to the Socialists, whose share of the popular vote climbed by 1.6% to 11.4%. Still, that was not nearly the gain that Party Leader Bettino Craxi had hoped for when he provoked the elections, a year ahead of schedule, by pulling out of Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani's coalition government last April. Several small rightist and centrist parties also increased their share of the seats...
...party will most likely command close to its traditional 38% of the vote. The Communists, under Enrico Berlinguer, have steadily been losing ground since reaching their high of 34.4% of the vote in 1976. Some polls predict 27% or 28% in next week's count. Socialist Leader Bettino Craxi, who forced the elections by bailing out of the last coalition government, had hoped to engineer major Socialist gains (perhaps 15% of the vote, compared with 9.8% in 1979), but the tactic backfired. Party strategists now say they will be relieved...
...Tuscan Pony. Despite his antiCommunist, anti-abortion stands, he gained a reputation as a pragmatist, forming the country's first left-of-center coalition with the Socialists in 1962. His ability to compromise was quickly put to use last week to mollify the present-day Socialists under Bettino Craxi...
...Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou swept to power last year on a wave of popular enthusiasm for promises of change, and Felipe González has now joined that socialist surge. Even in Italy, where centrist Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini still leads a shaky five-party coalition, the Socialists under Bettino Craxi have made steady gains in the polls and are poised to offer an alternative to the two major parties, the Christian Democrats and the Communists...
...austerity program designed to boost industrial production, reduce the balance of payments deficit and curb inflation. A renegade group of Christian Democrats broke party discipline and rejected a government proposal aimed at squeezing more tax revenues from the oil industry. Charging that the country was "ungovernable," Socialist Leader Bettino Craxi withdrew his party's seven ministers from the Cabinet. Given Craxi's barely concealed ambition to become Italy's first postwar Socialist Prime Minister, the crisis had all the earmarks of a Socialist power play...