Word: fanfani
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...Italian election campaign drew to a close this week, all eyes were on the little man with the big ambition. The little man: Amintore Fanfani, secretary-general and campaign manager of the Christian Democratic Party that has governed Italy since the war. The little man's big ambition: at 50, to become Premier of Italy. In pursuit of his dream, Fanfani popped up last week on the cobblestones of Palermo, in the sunny piazzas of a dozen southern farm towns, in the shadows of Milan's cathedral, in the monarchist stronghold of Naples. Since campaign's start...
Behind him functioned the best political organization in Italy, much of it his own making. Inheriting the mantle of party leadership just before the death of Italy's great postwar statesman. Alcide de Gasperi, in 1954. Fanfani reorganized and rejuvenated the party from the ward level up. For this year's campaign -the first the party has had to fight without the magic name of De Gasperi -Fanfani organized 120,000 Christian Democratic militants into cells of three people each (one woman, one young man, one cell chief). Student organizations, trade-union groups, para-religious organizations...
...Fanfani's Worry. This gadfly role has drawn upon Malagodi the combined fire of all Italy's major parties. The Communists rarely let a day pass without belaboring him as "a tool of big business." Amintore Fanfani, the busy little boss of the Christian Democrats, has publicly threatened to exclude the Liberals from future Cabinets. (Says Malagodi, chortling, "Fanfani's palms are sweating...
Chances are that Fanfani is indeed sweating. Under Italy's new electoral law-a complex melange of straight and proportional representation-the Communists and Christian Democrats will have to increase their ballot by between 500,000 and 1,000,000 votes in order not to lose parliamentary seats. By contrast, an increase of only 400,000 votes-half what they polled in the last election-could double the number of Liberal seats in the Chamber of Deputies...
Should that happen-and many Italian pundits believe it will-the Christian Democrats, for all Fanfani's threats, will almost certainly need Liberal support to form a government, and to obtain it will have to pay more heed to the gadfly voice of Giovanni Malagodi. "The reawakening of the Liberal Party," declared Rome's Il Messaggero last week, "constitutes the one new fact in this campaign . . . and it augurs well for Italian democracy...