Word: merzagora
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...government crisis again, created by the downfall of wispy, white-haired Premier Antonio Segni. But what seemed only an annual event (Premiers have averaged ten months in office since Italy's late great Alcide de Gasperi was defeated in 1953) became something more last week. Courteous, conservative Cesare Merzagora, 61, longtime president of Italy's Senate, dramatically posed a fundamental question: How healthy is Italy's 15-year-old postwar democracy...
...Merzagora's political patience was exhausted by the extralegal manner in which Segni's minority Christian Democratic government tiptoed out of office. Fortnight ago, outraged by President Giovanni Gronchi's humiliating visit to Moscow (TIME, Feb. 22) and convinced that the Christian Democrats were slipping toward an "unclear and unclean agreement" with Italy's big, Red-tainted Socialist Party, Italy's free-enterprising Liberals announced that their 18 Deputies would no longer support Segni. Since this meant that his government could survive only by accepting Fascist support, Segni resigned without even asking for a vote...
Next day in the Senate, Merzagora coldly pointed out that this was the third Italian government in a row that had been destroyed without any consultation with Parliament. If Italy's party bosses continued to make and unmake governments in cozy backroom deals, said Merzagora, "we might as well turn Parliament into a restricted executive committee to save time and money...
Then, though he himself is a distinguished Milanese businessman, Merzagora also threw in a blunt word of warning about the malign influence exercised on Italy's government by the nation's great capitalists and its huge government corporations, which have steadily expanded since Fascist days. Said he: "An atmosphere of corruption weighs on Italian political life, polluted by speculation and unlawful financial activities . . . If Italy does not soon rediscover the joys of political honesty, very sad prospects lie before...
...Camera." Gronchi requested conservative Senate President Cesare Merzagora to search the political horizon for possible Cabinets. Through this device Gronchi could extend his Cabinet-building negotiations to influential politicians who do not happen to be heads of parties, ex-Presidents or ex-Premiers-the only people Italy's President is constitutionally entitled to consult. And as he emerged from the President's office deep in the Quirinal Palace, Merzagora said: "In this situation I am merely a camera. I shall bring back precise and detailed photographs for the President of the Republic...