Word: gasperi
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Lanky, stooped and with an incongruous shock of white in his dark hair, Moro was the antithesis of the political emotionalism that had branded the Fascist years. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he was a protégé of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy's first postwar Premier. In political style, he was a conciliator, dedicated to the art of the possible, with a gift for fashioning ambiguous phrases that could be used to cloak disagreement. One of his most famous was "parallel convergences," which he used to describe the center-left formula for the 1963 D.C.-Socialist coalition...
...important step. After 52 days of do-nothing disagreement, Christian Democratic Premier-designate Giulio Andreotti and Communist Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer accepted a "governing agreement" that puts Communists directly in the majority for the first time since 1947, when they were expelled from the postwar Cabinet of Alcide de Gasperi...
Moro and his Christian Democrats have lately received help from an expected-but in some measure unwelcome-source. For the first time since the days when Alcide de Gasperi was the D.C. leader and autocratic Pope Pius XII threatened to excommunicate all Italians who voted Communist, the Vatican is taking a more overt part in an Italian campaign. Addressing a national conference of bishops last month, Pope Paul VI used the personal pronoun I instead of the pontifical we to stress his interest in the election. He obliquely exhorted Catholic voters to remain united behind the traditional Catholic party...
FEUDING FIEFS. Following De Gasperi's death in 1954, the party began to divide up along ideological and geographical lines into jealous fiefs ruled by various political princes. The factions stood together during elections but resumed a debilitating power struggle once the votes had been counted. Today, for instance, the most powerful group, the conservative Dorotei, "owns" about 27% of the party's membership, while the leftwing, urban-based Forze Nuove has 10%. Overall, the party is divided into two roughly equal, opposing camps, one old-guard conservative and the other comparatively youthful and progressive. In this standoff...
CLIPBOARD POLITICIANS. In its postwar heyday, party and people communicated through Catholic Action and other church-connected grassroots social organizations operating all over the country. But in the 1960s, as the clipboard-carrying technocrats who followed De Gasperi became absorbed in managing Italy's then burgeoning economy, the party's power base gradually shifted to an equally burgeoning sotto-governo, an "undergovernment" of state-controlled industries and agencies commanding power and patronage in virtually every area of Italian life. Eventually this machine came to be used to maintain power for its own sake, and the Christian Democrats...