THE 1919 ELECTIONS

It was clear from the 1919 election results summarised below that the major beneficiaries of ‘1919-ism’ were the two post-war mass parties:

the PSI and the Catholic Popular Party or PPI (Partito Popolare Italiano).

The great majority of peasant and proletarian combatants had voted for these parties as the radical alternatives to the ‘old Italy’.

The regional distribution of votes and parliamentary seats was extremely revealing. The PSI and PPI performed best in the north and the centre of the country. Only 10 of the PSI’s 156 seats and 24 of the PPI’s 100 seats were won in Italy south of Rome. The electoral strength of the liberal groupings lay precisely and overwhelmingly in the south and the islands. Ex-servicemen’s candidates stood in most southern constituencies as a self-declared regenerative force challenging the traditional clientelism and jobbing of southern politics, and 15 of the 20 elected were in southern seats. But veterans’ associations were only politically significant in Sardinia, and to a lesser extent in the Abruzzi and the Molise, where they inspired democratic regional autonomy movements.

It was apparently one of the freest votes ever, since the Prime Minister in 1919, Francesco Nitti, had formally declared that there would be none of the usual governmental interference in the electoral process. The PSI and the PPI had made the most of the premium placed on party organ-isation and a party platform by a list and multi-member constituency

Elections

1913 1919 1921

PSI 52 156 139

(includes 15 PCI)

PPI (28 Catholic) 100 108

Liberals and allies 400 220 239 (includes 36 Fascists)

form of proportional representation. In the pre-war single-member and simple majority system, personalities without a party organisation could still win the day. This had happened again in the south and the islands in 1919 even under the new electoral system, as clientelism persisted and the two mass parties were weaker and less organised there.

The parliament elected in 1919 was, therefore, a hybrid. Nearly half the Chamber of Deputies was made up of liberal groupings who had no permanent party organisation behind them and no precise and binding commitment to a party programme. The other half were deputies belonging to parties who were tied both to a party platform and an extraparliamentary party executive. The post-war Italian parliament was the meeting ground of modern party politics and the traditional liberal politics of personality, and the clash of two worlds played a part in the paralysis of parliamentary government between 1919 and 1922.

The electoral triumph of the PSI and the PPI in 1919 created a com-pletely new parliamentary context for the resolution of political and social conflicts. Parties with mass constituencies had achieved levels of parliamentary representation proportional to their actual strength in the country. This destroyed the possibility of automatic liberal parliament-ary majorities. As Charles Maier says, the 1919 elections marked the end of liberal parliamentary hegemony.⁹ The 1919 election results and those of 1921, which showed a basically similar configuration of polit-ical forces, made coalition government essential. But it was difficult to achieve stable parliamentary majorities for governments in the period 1919–22.

To a great extent, this was due to the attitude of the largest single group in parliament, the PSI. Consistent with its revolutionary maximalist position, the PSI refused to participate positively in the workings of the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeois state which it was committed to overthrow, and would not collaborate in parliament or outside with bourgeois parties. Its role in parliament was a spoiling one. It would vote against governments because governmental instability hastened the bankruptcy of state institutions. But it would never be available itself as a partner or supporter of coalition governments. The Socialist parlia-mentary group contained a high proportion of reformists, probably about sixty deputies. But although the reformist Socialists disagreed with the party’s maximalist stance, they were not prepared to break ranks out of a sense of party patriotism and unity. Only in August 1922 did the parliamentary reformist Socialists indicate their willingness to enter or

support a coalition government, in circumstances that, as we shall see, made their gesture both futile and counter-productive.

The liberals were never a unified parliamentary bloc before or after the war. The decline in their position at least in northern and central Italy reflected an inadequate electoral and party organisation for mass democratic politics, and political divisions opened up by the war, with neutralist liberals competing against interventionist liberals in many constituencies. Giolitti’s alienation from right liberals over the war made agreement among liberals in parliament problematic, at least in 1919–20.

By the time of the May 1921 elections, many of these war-derived divisions among liberals had been superseded by the need for unity against socialism, and ex-interventionist and ex-neutralist liberals stood together in Giolitti’s governmental electoral lists. Nevertheless even the establishment of the Liberal Party in October 1922 could not disguise the previous and continuing fragmentation of the liberal deputies in unstable parliamentary groupings based on personalities and regional affinity. Significantly, the main groupings of southern liberal deputies did not even join the Liberal Party.

The amorphousness of liberal parliamentary politics assumed real significance once it was clear after the 1919 elections that liberals could not govern alone and the PSI would not govern with any other party.

Stable parliamentary majorities were possible only if liberals and the PPI could reach some workable and lasting accommodation. Such a situation gave the youngest and most inexperienced political movement, the PPI, the pivotal role in post-war parliamentary politics.

The foundation of the PPI in January 1919 marked the full integra-tion of Catholics into the political life of the country. The Pope’s revocation of the non expedit in 1918 decoupled Catholic participation in national politics from the issue of the loss of the papacy’s temporal possessions in 1870 and from the exclusive identification of Catholics with the defence of the Church’s interests. The PPI was to be independ-ent of the Vatican and of the church’s network of Catholic laypeople’s organisations, Catholic Action: a ‘party of Catholics’, but not a ‘Catholic party’. Unlike the PSI, the PPI was a legalist and constitutionalist party, though committed to political reform. Proportional representation had been one of the first demands of the PPI not only because it would secure the party more seats in parliament. In the conception of Luigi Sturzo, the Christian Democrat Sicilian priest who led the party, proportional representation would help to clean up and modernise Italian politics by encouraging the formation of parties and open competition between

them on the basis of programmes. In this way also parliament could become the focal point of Italian political life, since under a reformed electoral system it would be truly representative of the popular will.

The PPI’s progressive and reforming programme had a distinctively Catholic emphasis on decentralisation, freedom of association, small peasant proprietorship, class collaboration and corporate representation, and the vitality of those ‘natural’ institutions like the family linking the individual to society and the state. The party was formally a confes-sional, but it was clearly inspired by Catholic principles: it was a Catholic democratic alternative to both liberalism and socialism. Sturzo’s desire for the PPI to be independent of the church was genuine enough, though his own position was difficult, since he was a priest subject to ecclesiastical discipline. The party programme also included, if it did not highlight, a commitment to the freedom and independence of the church, or in other words the defence of the church’s interests. Again, the church’s parochial structure, although naturally enough not coinciding with constituency boundaries, was a ready-made way of bringing in the Catholic vote. Many parish priests in the north and the centre were active supporters of the party and anyway involved in the web of Catholic social and economic organisations which covered the Catholic peasant heartland of Venetia and Lombardy. So, the PPI was not identified with the church, at least in its own eyes if not those of its political opponents. But it definitely had relations with the church and could not fail to be affected by the attitudes and priorities of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Vatican.

Despite aconfessionality, it was mainly a common religious affili-ation which encouraged Catholics to vote for the PPI. Its appeal to Catholics across class differences, apparently one of the sources of its electoral strength, was at the same time its point of vulnerability. The party was, in fact, itself a coalition of wide-ranging and often incom-patible interests with different conceptions of the party’s role. At one extreme was a combative union organisation whose spokesmen, the PPI deputy and labour organiser, Guido Miglioli, saw the party as a class party representing the ‘Christian proletariat’. At the other extreme were conservative Catholics, behind whom were important banking, industrial and landowning interests, who took a ‘clerico-moderate’ view of the party. They were open to right-wing political alliances and concerned that the party should be unashamedly Catholic and confessional in its identification with and defence of the church.

As a cross-class party, the PPI would be particularly subject to centrifugal pressures at times of serious social and political conflict, which in fact existed for most of the period between 1919 and 1922.

There were strong pressures from within the party and from the Vatican for the revival of ‘clerico-moderate’ electoral alliances against socialism, which Sturzo resisted to preserve the PPI’s independence, but was unable to prevent in all cases. Equally, the PPI left was urging co-operation with even the PSI against Fascism in 1921 and 1922. But symptomatically, tentative discussions between the PPI leadership and the reformist Socialists were inconclusive, once the ‘clerico-moderates’

in the party declared their opposition to any such PPI–PSI understand-ing. Inactivity and procrastination bought party unity, but reconciling the PPI factions clearly inhibited the party’s ability to be politically decisive and affected its availability for coalitions. Government crises were often confused and prolonged by the PPI struggling to come to terms with its own internal tensions. This was especially so in 1922, when the sheer exasperating inconclusiveness of the attempts to form governments undermined parliament’s credibility and helped to ease the way for Fascism’s entry into government.

The PPI was generally unwilling to take the responsibility for form-ing and leadform-ing coalition governments, because it was an inexperienced party and did not feel that its weight in parliament justified such action.

However, the party’s internal volatility meant that it could only with difficulty perform the pivotal stabilising role in parliament indicated by its commitment to parliamentary democracy and its electoral perform-ance. Coalitions between the PPI and liberals were inherently fragile, contributing to the paralysis and inactivity of government. Behind this instability lay policy differences which intertwined with different approaches to parliamentary government, a measure of the sudden impact of political democracy and of the liberals’ reluctance to adapt to the change.

Nitti, Prime Minister of three successive governments between June 1919 and June 1920, refused to adopt agrarian reform as a condition of PPI parliamentary support. His successor, Giolitti, Prime Minister between June 1920 and July 1921, whose government included PPI min-isters, similarly reneged on promises of female suffrage, proportional rep-resentation in local elections and state recognition of Catholic schools, which were meant to guarantee PPI backing. Besides the anti-clericalism of many liberals, these land and democratic reforms were difficult to accept, because they might damage liberals’ electoral and political

position, particularly in the south, even more the repository of liberal strength after the 1919 elections.

Binding programmatic commitments were also anathema to the usual liberal practice of the prime minister-designate cobbling together a coalition based on a loose alliance of parliamentary groupings, whose interests lay not so much in determining government policy as in gaining access to office and the patronage accompanying it. In contrast, the PPI insisted on prior agreement between prospective coalition partners for governments with a clear legislative programme, whose composition would be related to the parliamentary representation of each partner and whose continuation would depend on the enactment of the agreed policies.

This formal and rather inflexible stance directly related governments and their policies to the balance of parties in a popularly elected parliament.

By bitter experience, the PPI could not help concluding that to enter a government was to abandon its programme. This certainly influenced the PPI’s opposition to the mooted return to power of Giolitti in 1922 and thereby prolonged the government crises of that year. The PPI and the lib-erals never achieved a lasting accommodation because of this mismatch between modern party politics and trasformismo. In this way, post-war parliamentary politics reflected all too accurately the fundamental political, social and economic divide between the north and the south of the country. The liberals had been defeated by the two mass parties in 1919.

But because of the PSI’s indifference and hostility to parliament, and the PPI’s inability and reluctance to find a parliamentary role, they still had to govern.