Word: gasperi
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...shaky scaffolding of Italian politics, Premier Alcide de Gasperi worked warily to mortar together a new government for Italy, his eighth since the war. He could no longer count on the three small parties of his coalition to help carry the hod. Two were so hurt by the June elections that they barely counted any more, and the Democratic Socialists of Giuseppe Saragat, cut down to 19 seats, decided to quit the team...
...winner emerged a weakened but not a discouraged champion. In 1948 Premier Alcide de Gasperi's Christian Democrats and their center allies won 62% of the vote and a big majority in the Chamber of Deputies. This time they won a narrow edge in the Senate, but, though the leading party, failed by 57,000 votes to get a clear popular majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Had those comparatively few votes swung his way, De Gasperi's hard-fought electoral-reform law would have given him a bonus of about 80 seats. As it was proportional representation...
Technically it was a victory for De Gasperi, but psychologically it was a discomfiting setback. After five years of economic gains and political stability under De Gasperi, Italians had the opportunity to vote for democrats or totalitarians of left or right. Democracy got only 49.8% of the votes...
...Togliatti's Communists and Pietro Nenni's fellow-traveling Socialists had been expected only to hold their own. In the last days of the campaign, a U.S. Senate committee hearing 4,000 miles away gave the leftists effective ammunition for crumbling one of the pillars of De Gasperi's campaign-his ability to keep U.S. aid flowing to Italy. Communist newspapers and orators recited quotes from the testimony of a brass-tongued U.S. manufacturer named Frederick C. Crawford, head of Thompson Products, Inc. (jet engine parts), who had just come back from surveying MSA operations in Italy...
...Right, only a minor brother in 1948, won more than 2,000,000 votes from De Gasperi's center. With their appeal for a return to the tawdry glories of Mussolini, the neo-Fascists won 29 Chamber seats. Biggest gainers were the Monarchists, led by Naples' wealthy, shipowning Mayor Achille Lauro, whose big promises and free handouts of spaghetti and clothes won 7% of the votes and 40 seats...