Word: scelba
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Gronchi (pronounced gronc-key) is a Christian Democrat. But the loudest cheers came from the Communists and their fellow-traveling allies, Pietro Nenni's Socialists. Mario Scelba. the Christian Democratic Premier, stood in glum silence. He and Party Secretary Amintore Fanfani had done everything in their power to prevent the election of their fellow Christian Democrat. Gronchi's victory was a humiliating defeat for Scelba's shaky four-party coalition of the center; it was an open defiance of Fanfani's personal leadership of the big Christian Democratic Party, which has firmly guided Italy into...
...opening trade fairs. But he has one decisive function: he designates the Premier. In the faction-ridden Christian Democratic Party, Gronchi is the leader of a group which advocates the "opening to the left." He is also his party's outstanding symbol of a leftist neutralist tendency. With Scelba's government riven by disputes, the danger is that Gronchi would, sooner or later, pick a Premier who would bring the Nenni Socialists and their Communist-minded policies into the government...
...weeks before the presidential election, Fanfani and Scelba had been conferring with the three minor parties of the coalition to decide who should succeed Luigi Einaudi, a Liberal, as President. Einaudi is widely respected, but he is 81, and many disliked setting a precedent of a second seven-year term. Scelba declared the candidate should not be a Christian Democrat. The Liberals. Social Democrats and Scelba's own faction in the Christian Democrats were willing to support Einaudi. Fanfani was not. At an eleventh-hour meeting before the Deputies and Senators gathered in Rome's big Montecitorio Palace...
...third ballot, near midnight, the Socialists threw their 100-odd votes to Gronchi, sending him surging into the lead. All night long, before the fourth ballot, Fanfani tried to stem the rebellion. He got Merzagora to write out a letter withdrawing his candidacy in favor of Einaudi. Then, with Scelba, he went to Gronchi and asked him to withdraw too. Gronchi refused. "You have always believed in force," he told Fanfani. "Now that I am stronger than you are, I don't see why I should do any such thing." Knowing that the Communists would throw their bloc...
...good friend Pietro Nenni, winner of the Stalin Peace Prize, who has been pushing hard to infiltrate the government, was openly delighted to have Gronchi as President. In all probability, Gronchi's victory means that the days of Premier Scelba are numbered. And faced with such a personal rebuff, it was hard to see how Amintore Fanfani could long continue as party secretary. Whatever Gronchi might or might not do as President until 1962, his election in an atmosphere of doubt, ambiguity and faction, proved that there is nothing resembling strong leadership in Italian politics generally...