The Republic of Parties: from Singular to Plural in the 1948 Italian Constitution
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The Republic of Parties: From Singular to Plural in the 1948 Italian Constitution benedetta barbisan 1. When Political Parties and the Constitution the Resistance. The national flag might have Met: How To Make a Form of Government sufficed against the Germans, but, against Deliberately Inefficient and Unstable Mussolini’s puppet Fascist Social Republic in the North and the royal dictatorship in To understand what occurred in the the South, Italians needed a new banner of proceedings of the Constituent Assembly1 democracy that only the committees could and how the new form of government was champion. Symbolising the democratic engineered, we need to start our story political unity of the country, the CLN was «the most important political innovation of before, in fact from the so called svolta di 2 Salerno (turning point of Salerno) in April the Resistance» . The CLN was composed of the Commu- 1944, when the leader of the Communist nist Party (PCI), the Socialist Party (PSI- Party, Palmiro Togliatti, put forward the idea UP), the Action Party (Pd’A), the Christian of a compromise between antifascist parties Democratic Party (DC), the Labor Dem- gathered in the CLN, the House of Savoy ocrats (LD) and the Liberal Party (PLI), and the Prime Minister, Marshal Pietro each accorded an equal voice. During the Badoglio, to create the first government of years of the exile in France, the antifascist national unity since Mussolini’s deposition. groups had attempted to stay together, but In the late summer 1943 – after the fall in 1933 the effort had definitively failed. It of the fascist regime caused by the Grand was immediately after the armistice, then, Council of Fascism passing a vote of no that the CLN self-attributed a true constit- confidence against Mussolini –, a network uent power in the guise of an original public of committees mushroomed in several cit- institution3. ies and provinces for the purpose of coordi- The ethos and nature of the CLN is wor- nating the political and military activities of thy of closer attention, both for the role giornale di storia costituzionale / journal of constitutional history 39 / I 2020, pp. 173-190 173 ISSN 1593-0793 / ISBN 978-88-6056-654-6 / © eum 2020 Ricerche it played in those years and for its flaws, deal was closed on the firm understand- foreshadowing future dysfunctions and ing that, retaining the formal ownership of even pathologies of the Republic’s insti- the throne, the king Victor Emmanuel III tutional system. Operating an irreplacea- handed over the royal prerogatives to his ble political and institutional part within son, Umberto, as Lieutenant General of the the provisionary system, the CLN became Realm8. a Parliament-like body4 in a de facto par- Marshal Badoglio, that had until then liamentary form of government5. The CLN opposed the collaboration with the un- located in the South struck a political deal derground parties, felt obliged to abide with the Crown with the turning point of the agreement also in light of the declin- Salerno, whilst in the North the National ing reputation of the Crown to the benefit Committee for the Liberation of Northern of the CLN9. But Badoglio would remain Italy (CNLAI) acted as a revolutionary force in power less than two months, resigning in the territories occupied by the Nazis or right after the liberation of Rome from the under the rule of Mussolini’s Social Italian German occupation, on 8 June 1944. Ivanoe Republic and as a ruler in the zones gradu- Bonomi, the President of the CLN, was then ally liberated. entrusted with forming the second govern- The CLN experience in the Italian dem- ment of national unity in virtue of the sup- ocratic transition did not resemble other port offered by all the parties of the CLN. coeval national liberation movements, like With public institutions collapsing and the the Jugoslavian or the French, headed by moral fibre of the nation decomposing, the charismatic leaders as Josip Broz Tito and commitment political parties were capable Charles De Gaulle. On the contrary, the of in that phase through the CLN allowed CLN was always directed by a coalition of the participation of popular masses in the political parties and operating under the democratic rebirth of the country10. rule of unanimity and equal representation. The transfer of power from Badoglio to All the forces convened in the CLN were Bonomi took place in the lapse of just few unanimous in pursuing the Liberation, days, but it amounted to a radical consti- but not as much in singling out the aims to tutional transition, with an unprecedented achieve and in drafting a political program gain in importance for the CLN’s political of the Resistance6. What the political par- parties: on 22 April 1944, Marshal Badoglio ties collected in the CLN were skilful at was and his ministers had sworn in before the approaching democracy by providing rep- king, according to the precepts of the Al- resentation, but they could not be as much bertine Statute; on 18 June 1944, instead, resourceful at organising that representa- Bonomi installed his government as the tion. As a result, the CLN ended up tracing direct expression of the CLN’s parties. By out worn out models of Italian institutional 18 April 1945, the date of the first national past7. elections after the war, the monarchy, the The first government of national unity army, the liberal élite were all already out forged in Salerno in April 1944 involved of the picture, with CLN’s political parties all the parties included in the CLN and was remained as the sole interlocutors for the presided over by Marshal Badoglio. The Allies. So much had been slow the evolution 174 Barbisan of popular political parties under the mon- est momentousness of the parties that had archy how fast and profound their transfor- animated the CLN. We saw already that the mation between 1943 and 194811. germinal idea of a constituent phase had After the end of the war, the major issue been concocted between the fall 1943 and was how to generate democracy in Italy. On the early 1944, during the intricate nego- this account, there were those, like Ferruc- tiation in Salerno among the Crown, the cio Parri, who contended the failure of de- political parties and the Allies. The parties mocracy in Italy even before the coming of inside the CLN envisioned the involvement Mussolini, having been fascism a litmus test of the people as the most befitting solution of sorts of the evils already affecting Italian to sort the Italian crisis out, also because institutions; on the other side, Benedetto they wanted to ease the work of the Constit- Croce asserted that Italy had experienced a uent Assembly. Also the monarchy and the real democratic development between 1860 representatives of the Allies were in favour and 1922 and exhorted to restart from there of this option, convinced in this way to get to found a new democracy. For the former, better chances to survive. Italy had a democratic will but not a demo- The process of devising the form of gov- cratic regime to look up to; for the latter, the ernment put at its very core two ingredi- past would teach the future. Whether Italy ents: the centrality of political parties and had ever known democracy was, then, what the refusal of any snap decision method. the dispute was about12. On 20 November 1946, Giuseppe Dosset- An undemocratic mass society was the ti proposed an agenda (ordine del giorno) critical heritage fascism had left behind, for the acknowledgment of constitutional and the major challenge the Italian transi- prerogatives to political parties, as suggest- tion after the war would pose is the access of ed by Lelio Basso the day before. Although these popular masses in a newly established this agenda was never discussed, it reveals democracy. After the First World War, both the inspiration underneath, aiming at lo- Mussolini and Don Luigi Sturzo, the found- cating political parties in the very bosom of er of the Popular Party, had realised that the the new institutions. And the discussion on state had to be restructured entirely and how to design the form of government was masses finally pulled into public political conducted on the implied premise that po- life. The Fascist National Party (PNF) was litical parties could manoeuvre it. used to build a mass society inside a total- A few key sessions within the Constit- itarian regime. Once it lost its general ap- uent Assembly outlined this address. On proval – not for the entry into the war or 4 and 5 September 1946, three positions because of the antifascist wave, too fieble emerged concerning which form of gov- and almost non existing, but by implosion, ernment to introduce: firstly, everybody, by inner erosion13 –, it had already indel- with the sole exception of the Action Party ebly marked not only Italian laws and in- (Pd’A)14, was against presidentialism and stitutions, but, more importantly, Italians’ inclined to promote a parliamentary gov- mentality. ernment; secondly, catholics and liberals The debate inside the Constituent As- were endorsing a more rationalised system; sembly mirrored this climate and the lat- thirdly, socialists and communists insisted 175 Ricerche on avoiding too rigid constitutional limita- of the legislative power16 –, rationalised but tions on the form of government. On this not too vigorously: for instance, with refer- latter account, it was the member of the ence to the relation between the executive Communist Party Giorgio Amendola that, and the Constituent Assembly, Article 3, on 5 September 1946, delineated this view- paras. 3 and 4, D.