Word: scelba
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Balding little Mario Scelba began his premiership briskly last February by saying: "Now let's get down to business'." Though his majority was small, he announced bold projects to cure Italy's nagging ills, and acted as if he expected to launch them forthwith. Living up to his reputation as Italian Communism's chief scourge, which he had earned as De Gas-peri's Minister of the Interior, Scelba began auspiciously by ejecting Communist organizations from the lush premises they had seized from former Fascist owners and by evacuating government-employee unions (mostly Communist...
...Tempo. The Cabinet announced one project after another: an extensive public-works program to alleviate Italy's chronic unemployment, a big housing program, a new income-tax law providing six-month prison terms for Italy's notorious tax evaders. But after ten months in office, Premier Mario Scelba's government has failed to get even one of its major proposals enacted into law. In Rome's cafes, the word for Scelba's performance is immobilismo...
Parliamentary Inaction. One trouble lies in the wrenching strains within Scelba's patchy coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals, Social Democrats and Republicans. Right and left wings mistrust each other. In parliamentary committee, the coalition partners haggle, filibuster and squabble in bickering inaction. The tax-evasion bill was proposed in March, introduced into the Senate in April, referred to the finance committee, which did not even discuss it for three months. Then Liberals and conservative Christian Democrats proposed one amendment after another to the bill. Said one government member ruefully: "In America you have penalties up to ten years...
...Italy, where for a long time it was unfashionable to fight the Reds too hard, Premier Mario Scelba. his Cabinet and the pro-government press passed over the U.S. action in silence. Industrialists (some of whom, for protection's sake, have hired Communists as personnel directors) were silent too. But not the discomfited Reds. "Brutal interference . . . hateful measure . . . incitement to Fascism!" cried the Communists...
Before the Senate, Scelba made no pretense that Italians had got all they wanted. "I would fail in my duty," he said, "if I did not frankly confess that these frontier adjustments grieve us deeply." But he added triumphantly: "After ten years the flag of the fatherland will again fly over the town hall and the Church of San Guisto of Trieste." At that, the whole Senate rose to its feet, the center and right cheering, only the Communists silent. (They could not afford to oppose the universal Italian yearning to have Trieste, but neither could they stand...