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POLARIZATION - Americans are alarmed by their country’s stark political divisions. But they shouldn’t despair. After World War II, Italy was even more politically polarized than America is today. Yet by the mid-1950s, it had succeeded, against the odds, in turning the page on its fascist past and constructing a contentious but functioning democracy.
The leadership and coalition-building of Alcide (Al-chee-deh) De Gasperi—head of Christian Democracy, the party representing Italy’s millions of Catholics, and prime minister from December 1945 to August 1953—was decisive for this transition to democracy. His political skills and occasional ruthlessness were unmatched, and may offer today’s politicians inspiration in the face of populist demagogues.
De Gasperi was born in April 1881 in Pieve Tesino, a village in the foothills of the Dolomites in the Trentino region, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One shouldn’t romanticize the young De Gasperi’s politics: As a university student, he sided with the populist Catholic movement of Vienna politician Karl Lueger, who was virulently anti-socialist and antisemitic. But distrust of nationalist fervor ultimately became a guiding force in De Gasperi’s politics and life.
His political career began in 1911, when he was elected to the imperial parliament in Vienna. There, he argued for greater rights for Italians within the Austrian Empire, rather than for unification of the Trentino with Italy. The Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria awarded the Trentino to Italy at the end of World War I, and De Gasperi became an Italian citizen. He quickly emerged as one of the principal figures of the Catholic-inspired Italian Popular Party, the country’s second biggest party, which split over how to deal with the rise of Mussolini in 1922. De Gasperi was among those who rejected any compromise with fascism—despite the Vatican’s support for the fascist movement. In 1926, Mussolini banned the Popular Party when he made Italy a one-party state; in 1927, the Duce’s government arrested De Gasperi for his hostility to the regime, staging a show trial and confining him in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison for nearly 18 months. After his release, De Gasperi laid low for more than a decade, working in the Vatican Library and writing on foreign policy for Vatican newspapers under different pseudonyms.
De Gasperi could return to politics only when the war turned against Mussolini, and the dictatorship started to crumble. In fall 1942, De Gasperi and other Catholic leaders held clandestine meetings to create a new political party: Christian Democracy. Writing as “Demofilo,” De Gasperi composed the new party’s manifesto, which committed to working for social justice and a decentralized democracy that respected regions and local government.
By September 1943, Italy was divided in two: the German-occupied North (where Mussolini led a puppet regime) and the Allied-occupied South. As the Allies and Italian partisan forces inched their way up the peninsula, De Gasperi began working with two unlikely partners to find common ground and a unified path forward for Italy. Pietro Nenni, a firebrand socialist orator, and Palmiro Togliatti, a communist leader who had survived the great purges in Moscow, were true believers in the Soviet experiment; De Gasperi, like most Catholics, distrusted concentration of power in Stalin’s hands.
De Gasperi and Nenni formed a bond of friendship, despite deep political differences. Togliatti, whom Stalin had sent back to Italy from Moscow in March 1944, detested De Gasperi thoroughly. But he recognized that Italy’s Catholics were a force to be reckoned with.
The trio—a cynical communist apparatchik; a vain, fiery, self-taught socialist; and a devout Catholic former Austrian with a steely will—became the Italian Republic’s founding fathers, somehow finding a modus vivendi. Each headed a blocco sociale (social bloc) of millions of voters at war’s end. Togliatti’s Communists boasted 2 million card-carrying members and thousands of war-trained partisans with carefully hidden guns. Nenni’s Socialists held on to their traditional power base among the industrial workers of the North. De Gasperi’s Christian Democracy represented peasants, artisans, and the lower middle class.
Yet in the tumultuous decade that followed the fall of Mussolini, the Italian people built a democratic state, leaders from all parties made compromises in the national interest, and a principled prime minister made tough decisions.
The three parties worked together to abolish the monarchy, which they regarded as compromised by fascism. In June 1946, 54% of Italians voted to establish a republic; De Gasperi, who became premier in December 1945, was decisive in forcing a reluctant king to accept the result. The parties also cooperated to draw up a socially progressive constitution based on three core principles: that Italy would be a “democratic republic founded on labor’,” that it would be anti-fascist, and that it would disperse power through institutional checks and balances. In the interest of religious peace, Togliatti acquiesced to Christian Democracy’s demand that Catholicism be the official religion of the state (with protection for the rights of Protestants, Jews, and freethinkers). Nenni, an inveterate anticlerical, reluctantly accepted Togliatti’s fait accompli.
But even before the new constitution took effect on January 1, 1948, the Cold War had destroyed cooperation between the three mass parties. In May 1947, upon learning that the U.S. was planning aid for Europe—but only to countries where pro-Moscow forces held no sway—De Gasperi forced out the two left-wing parties. Top figures in his own party feared riots in the streets, but De Gasperi carried his point by sheer force of personality. He told doubters, “We either do it now, or we’ll never do it.”
It was an act of ruthlessness that probably saved Italian democracy—ensuring the country desperately needed financial support courtesy of the Marshall Plan.
Eleven months later, Italians headed to the polls for the April 1948 elections, which were fought with virulence by both sides. Christian Democracy, whose symbol was the scudocrociato, a shield with a superimposed red cross, depicted itself as a defender against Bolshevik hordes, free love, and baffone (big mustaches, i.e. Stalin); the Communists depicted De Gasperi as a hireling of Wall Street, Truman’s lackey, and as a German servant of the Vatican, replete with a spiked Prussian helmet. (Anybody who thinks the 2024 U.S. election was hysterical should type “electoral propaganda Italy 1948” in Google and look at the images.)
But De Gasperi scored a striking victory: 48% of the vote, against 31% for the pro-Moscow parties. For the next five years he governed in coalition with two anti-communist left-wing parties, declaring Christian Democracy to be a “party of the center, striding leftwards.” Following a now-established pattern, his positions were part pragmatism, part principle. De Gasperi understood that providing greater social justice was a political necessity. He set his face against attempts by Pope Pius XII to drag Christian Democracy to the right, refusing to collude with monarchists and imposing strict laws restricting neo-fascists’ political activity. At the same time, the Communists regarded his government—which used sometimes violent police force against them—as authoritarian. The early 1950s were years of great political tension.
Ultimately, De Gasperi’s second coalition government laid the groundwork for Italy’s “economic miracle”—its rapid mid-century industrialization—and permitted the nation to emerge from the economic autarchy Mussolini had imposed. It didn’t last forever. Despite efforts at electoral reform designed to keep his majority in power (dubbed the “Swindle Law” by opponents), De Gasperi’s six-party coalition failed to get a majority—by just 95,000 votes—in the June 1953 elections. Italy, absent an electoral law capable of providing a majority and De Gasperi’s shrewd political leadership, began a lengthy period of political instability.
Upon his death a year later, in August 1954, Italians revered De Gasperi as a political giant. Today, he is all but forgotten, at least in the English-speaking world, where Italy’s achievements as a democracy are often belittled. Yet in the tumultuous decade that followed the fall of Mussolini, the Italian people built a democratic state, leaders from all parties made compromises in the national interest, and a principled prime minister made tough decisions. De Gasperi was above all a man who acted in the interests of the patria, not for self-serving reasons, or from personal egoism. There may be a lesson here.
(Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of History and International Studies at SAIS Europe, the Bologna center of the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy. This article was first published in Zocalopublicsquare.org.)
