Word: fanfani
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Even in the rough-and-tumble of Italian politics, tough, indefatigable Amintore Fanfani excelled at infighting. Seven months ago, when the Chamber of Deputies with only seven votes to spare invested him Premier, it seemed that he had at last achieved his ambition. He was a man with three crucial jobs: Premier, Foreign Minister, boss of the Christian Democratic Party. But last week, his triumph reduced to ashes, Amintore Fanfani renounced all his jobs and his dream...
Immediate cause of Fanfani's downfall was a split inside his coalition partner, the Social Democrats, without whose 22 votes his government had no majority in the chamber. But, as in a classic tragedy, the real cause lay within Amintore Fanfani himself. In his four-year fight to win unchallenged control of the Christian Democratic Party, Fanfani had performed a useful service by remolding the party machinery in his own efficient image: late to bed, early to rise, always on the job. Trouble was that by ruthless pursuit of his own ambitions, Fanfani had made enemies. Ex-Premier Mario...
...Stalin, Nenni, a 1952 Stalin Peace prizewinner, has been making noises about breaking his 14-year-old alliance with Italy's 2,000,000-strong Communist Party. Nenni condemned the Russian smashing of the Hungarian revolt, and privately he calls the Reds "black beasts." With this in mind, Fanfani designed his semi-Socialist program partly to tempt the Nenni Socialists into part-time support of his government. Alarmed, the right-wing Christian Democratic faction of ex-Premier Guiseppe Pella warned Fanfani that they would leave the party if they were "betrayed by this unnatural association with Marxism...
...last week, when Pietro Nenni rose to speak at his party's biennial congress in Naples, Fanfani's dreams and the right-wingers' fears became academic. Weaving and bobbing around the microphone, Nenni shouted: "This government has almost been brought to the ground, which is already scattered with the bones of some of its most notable members . . . The policy of Fanfani is a phony socialism, with echelons of plans and reforms favorable only to monopolistic groups . . . Christian Democracy spells zero, and on zero you can build nothing. Our place is in the opposition." Furthermore, declared Nenni: "Prejudice...
...while he was neither ready to help Fanfani nor to climb down one bit from his neutralist foreign policy, Nenni was ready at last to break his formal "unity of action" pact with the Reds. Over stormy protests from pro-Communist members of the party, the delegates voted by a 3-to-2 margin to end the "popular front" electoral alliance with the Communists. Cooperation with the Reds will continue in trade unions, local governments and cooperatives. At the moment, this amounted to not much of a break for Nenni, and none at all for Fanfani...