Word: gasperi
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Contrast to France. Though the crash was long in the making, it hit the Western nations with the jolt of grim surprise. Outsiders had grown accustomed to the idea that democracy had taken firm footing in postwar Italy. Over nearly eight postwar years, wily old Alcide de Gasperi, expertly pulling the strings of governmental bureaucracy and party politics, built his defeated country into a respectable, economically vigorous and politically forceful ally of the West. On the surface, Italy seemed a healthy contrast to perpetually ailing France...
...summer's elections. The extreme left and extreme right gained strength. The Christian Democrats' three minor-party allies were crippled. The Monarchists took 26 more seats (for a total of 40) away from the Christian Democratic right-and thereby earned themselves the bitter enmity of Democrat de Gasperi. By a hair, 55,000 votes out of 28 million, the De Gasperi coalition missed winning the parliamentary bonus which De Gasperi's electoral reform law held out to any party or coalition winning more than 50% of the popular vote. De Gasperi could not assemble a majority...
...really had won, and the voters didn't know it. That startling fact illustrates the present muddle of Italian politics. The De Gasperi coalition actually polled more than a majority of the gross vote-some 52%-and was entitled to a bonus, which would have given De Gasperi 657 of the seats. He did not claim it. The Communists had cannily challenged 1,300.000 ballots-three times more than they challenged in the 1948 elections. The bulk of the questioned ballots are known to be legally pro-De Gasperi, entitling the democratic coalition to about 70 seats held...
...Caretaker. Last August Giuseppe Pella got power chiefly because he promised not to exert it. He is a Christian Democrat, and he served for five years in De Gasperi's government as the brilliantly successful keeper of the budget. But Giuseppe Pella had no political organization of his own, no party faction behind him. The party did not choose him to be Premier. It was not even consulted in advance. Pella's old friend and mentor, President Luigi Einaudi, tapped Pella because he merely wanted someone to govern as a caretaker while the Christian Democrats settled among themselves...
Pella showed great political skill in moving in first for a showdown with his own party; for neither De Gasperi nor the heads of other factions in the party were ready for Pella to fall. This week Pella called in newspapermen and confidently announced that the "transition government" phase was over; in the new year he would set up a new kind of government with new men, pledged to 1) better distribution of wealth; 2) better housing; 3) defense of the state; 4) working toward "truly international solidarity...