1948 Italian general election
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All 574 seats in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and 237 (of the 343) seats in the Italian Senate | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Italian elections of 1948 were the second democratic elections with universal suffrage ever held in Italy, after the 1946 elections to the Constituent Assembly, responsible for drawing up and adopting the Italian Constitution. Election day was on 18 April 1948.
The elections were heavily influenced by the Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. After the Soviet-inspired February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the US became alarmed about Soviet intentions and feared that, if the leftist coalition were to win the elections, the Soviet-funded Italian Communist Party (PCI) would draw Italy into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. As the last month of the 1948 election campaign began, Time magazine pronounced the possible leftist victory to be "the brink of catastrophe".[2]
The elections were won by a comfortable margin by the Christian Democracy, funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), defeating the left-wing Popular Democratic Front of the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). The Christian Democrats formed a government that excluded the Communists, who had been in government from June 1944 until May 1947.
Violent campaign
The elections remain unmatched in verbal aggression and fanaticism in Italy's history, on both sides. The Christian Democrat propaganda became famous in claiming that in Communist countries "children sent parents to jail", "children were owned by the state", "people ate their own children", and claiming disaster would strike Italy if the left were to take power.[3][4] Another remarkable slogan was "In the secrecy of the polling booth, God sees you - Stalin doesn't."[5] The PCI was de facto leading the FDP, and had effectively marginalised the PSI, which eventually became the actual casualty of these elections, in terms of Parliamentary seats and political power;[6] the Socialists also heavily paied the secession of their social-democratic faction led by Giuseppe Saragat, which contested the election within the concurrent list of Socialist Unity.
The PCI had difficulties in restraining its more militant members, who in previous years had unleashed a killing spree against perceived "class enemies" (priests, landlords, etc.)[citation needed]. The areas affected by the violence (the so called "Red Triangle" of Emilia, or parts of Liguria around Genoa and Savona, for instance) had previously seen vicious episodes of brutality on part of the Fascists during the Mussolini regime and the Italian Resistance, raging as the Allies slowly conquered Italy. The legacy not only of Fascism, but of past social structures in general, was deeply resented, especially by the poorer people. These killings too, though eventually stopped on strict orders from the Communist Party itself, had some role in the heated political debate.[citation needed]
Superpower influence
The 1948 general election was heavily influenced by the United States as part of their ongoing effort to fight communism. The CIA, by its own later admission, gave $1 million to Italian "center parties".[7] and was accused of publishing forged letters in order to discredit the leaders of the Italian Communist Party.[8] The National Security Act of 1947, that made foreign covert operations possible, was just signed into law a half year earlier by the American President Harry S. Truman.
"We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets," according to CIA operative F. Mark Wyatt.[9] In order to influence the election, the US agencies undertook a campaign of writing ten million letters, made numerous short-wave radio broadcasts of propaganda and funded the publishing of books and articles, all of which warned the Italians of what the US felt would be the consequences of a communist victory. Time Magazine backed the campaign and featured the Christian Democrat leader and Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi on the cover of its April 19, 1948 issue and in its lead story.[10]
The PCI, on the other hand, was funded by the Soviet Union. "The Communist Party of Italy was funded ... by black bags of money directly out of the Soviet compound in Rome; and the Italian services were aware of this. As the elections approached, the amounts grew, and the estimates [are] that $8 million to $10 million a month actually went into the coffers of communism. Not necessarily completely to the party: Mr. Di Vittorio and labor was powerful, and certainly a lot went to him," according to a former CIA operative.[8]
The Christian Democrats won the 1948 election with 48 percent of the vote, while the FDP only received 31 percent. The CIA's practice of buying political clout was repeated in every Italian election for at least the next 24 years.[9] A leftist coalition would not win a general election for the next 48 years, till 1996. This was due to the Italians' traditional bend for conservatism, on one side, but even more importantly to the Cold War, with the US closely eyeing Italy, and often heavily meddling in its politics, not always by licit means (See: strategy of tension), in their desire to maintain a vital NATO presence amidst the Mediterranean.[11]
Results
Chamber of Deputies
| Christian Democracy | 48.5% |
| Popular Democratic Front (PCI–PSI) | 31.0% |
| Socialist Unity | 7.1% |
| National Bloc | 3.8% |
| National Monarchist Party | 2.8% |
| Italian Republican Party | 2.5% |
| Italian Social Movement | 2.0% |
| Others | 2.3% |
Senate
| Christian Democracy | 48.1% |
| Popular Democratic Front (PCI–PSI) | 30.9% |
| Socialist Unity | 4.2% |
| National Bloc | 5.4% |
| National Monarchist Party | 1.7% |
| Italian Republican Party | 2.6% |
| Italian Social Movement | 0.8% |
| Others | 6.4% |
See also
References
- ^ Due to impossibility of direct confrontation cause the split of PSI between the revolutionary and the social-democratic fractions in 1947, the percentage refers to the empiric sum of PCI and PSI in 1946, and Popular Front and Socialist Unity in 1948.
- ^ Fateful Day, Time Magazine, March 22, 1948
- ^ Show of Force, Time Magazine, April 12, 1948
- ^ How to Hang On, Time Magazine, April 19, 1948
- ^ Fertility vote galvanises Vatican, BBC News, 13 June 2005
- ^ The Communist party gained more than the two thirds of the seats won by the joint lists with the Socialists. Number of MPs for each political group during the First Legislature, Italian Chamber of Deputies website.
- ^ CIA memorandum to the Forty Committee (National Security Council), presented to the Select Committee on Intelligence, US House of Representatives (The Pike Committee) during closed hearings held in 1975. The bulk of the committee's report which contained this memorandum was leaked to the press in February 1976 and first appeared in book form as CIA – The Pike Report (Nottingham, England, 1977). The memorandum appears on pp. 204-5 of this book.
- ^ a b "CNN Cold War Episode 3: Marshall Plan. Interview with F. Mark Wyatt, former CIA operative in Italy during the election". CNN.com. 1998–1999. Retrieved 2006-07-17.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) - ^ a b F. Mark Wyatt, 86, C.I.A. Officer, Is Dead, The New York Times, July 6, 2006
- ^ How to Hang On, Time Magazine, April 19, 1948
- ^ "N.A.T.O. Gladio, and the strategy of tension". Chapter from “NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe”, by daniele Ganser. October 2005. Retrieved 2006-07-21.
Further reading
- Blum, William (2000). Killing Hope. Common Courage Press. ISBN 1-56751-053-1. Chapter 2 Italy 1947-1948: Free elections: Hollywood style [1]
- Blum, William (2000). Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. Common Courage Press. ISBN 1-56751-194-5. Chapter 16 Perverting elections
