Early elections at the gates?
Around the corner of the legislature, the ghost of the early elections of 1972. Francesco Damato between history and news
It's not a joke. I didn't invent any time machine to go back 50 years. It is only this cursed political news that takes me back half a century and makes me warn of certain inconveniences, let's call them that, fortunately younger or older colleagues. Or the parliamentarians who understandably fear, I would say humanly, early elections before maturing the right to even a modest pension, as it has been reduced, which matures only six months before the ordinary expiry of the legislature, that is, next autumn.
Some – the colleagues who tell and comment on what they see or perceive – and the others – the deputies and senators, moreover already suffering from the idea of the new Chambers to which they will not be able to return due to the sharp reduction in seats imprudently arranged by themselves , or due to the electoral crisis of the parties or movements of belonging or origin – they cannot bet at all on the lack of precedents to exclude that the next president of the Republic, or the outgoing one if confirmed, will never dare to dissolve the Chambers before which he has sworn .
"But we have not seen in the entire republican history – the good Antonella Rampino just wrote right here, on Doubt – a Head of State whose first act is the dissolution of the Parliament that elected him". Oh no, dear Antonella. I saw it when you were only 15, if I did the math correctly. It was my friend Giovanni Leone, elected President of the Republic on December 24, 1971, at the 23rd vote, took office by oath before the Chambers on December 29, and found himself on January 15, 1972 faced with the resignation of the Prime Minister, and his colleague in departed, Emilio Colombo was forced shortly after by circumstances to dissolve the Chambers more than a year earlier than the ordinary deadline.
Among the no lesser circumstances of that traumatic solution to the crisis was the need or opportunity, as you prefer, felt by both major parties – the DC in government led by Arnaldo Forlani and the opposition PCI – to avoid a referendum in which both did not feel prepared at the time, preferring to try to undo the knot in parliament. It was the referendum to abrogate the law instituting divorce, which due to the early elections, in fact, was postponed to 1974, when the DC passed, indeed returned in the meantime under the leadership of Amintore Fanfani, who had already conducted it in the 1950s, wanted face the test losing it sensationally.
Not one but a nice bunch of referendums, just promoted on the issues of justice by Northern League supporters and radicals amidst the hostility of Enrico Letta's Democratic Party and the grillini, could be 50 years later, in a few months, the destructive detonator of this eighteenth legislature, the strangest or craziest of all republican history, even if the secretary Piddino has just told the Corriere della Sera that he wants it to arrive, in the current framework, at the ordinary epilogue.
Rather than undoing the knots of justice with the referendum blade on the civil responsibility of robes, on the separation of careers and more, in open challenge to the judiciary perched like a caste in the defense of spaces that has been won in years also of political substitute guilty allowed by the rotating majorities, Pd and 5 Stars may prefer early voting. And groped to untie those legislative knots in the new Chambers, if they ever manage to win the elections as Enrico Letta has shown that he hopes by contenting himself with the results of the first round of administrative elections held in recent days, indeed rejoicing in their outcome and proclaiming himself the winner, federator and anything else of a center-left alliance extended to Conte's 5 Stars, or “experimental”, as Romano Prodi preferred to call it. Perhaps he also glimpsed something of his Olive Tree or of his Union: the combinations with which in the so-called Second Republic he managed to win the elections against Silvio Berlusconi twice, even though he was unable to last for the next five years.
But that on this eighteenth legislature Draghi has long been aware of the risks of an interruption, beyond the political inexperience that he occasionally declares due to the completely different nature of his long and prestigious public career, has been understood in recent days. He let a press report flow without denial according to which, by letting the Council of Ministers have a facilitating rule for referendums in the pipeline, to which those on cannabis and the end of life have been added, he would have reminded the interlocutors of the risk that every referendum trial runs. to be postponed in case of early elections.
Allow me now some memories, also of a personal nature, of Giovanni Leone's adventure 50 years ago in the uncomfortable role of the executioner of the Chambers that had just elected him, at the end of a competition at the beginning of which only one bet on his election by talking about it in private. with friends: the then deputy secretary of the DC Ciriaco De Mita, whose current was at least sympathetic to one of the sons of the then senator for life and already twice president of the Council.
The initial candidate of the DC in that edition of the race to the Quirinale for the succession to Giuseppe Saragat was Amintore Fanfani, who started from the favorable position of the Presidency of the Senate but neutralized by the "snipers" of his own party, as well as by the explicit hostility of the socialists although allies of government of the Crusader shield, who feared, rightly or wrongly, Gaullist temptations.
After the strong candidacy of Fanfani, in whose political stable he was formed, in a dozen votes, the secretary of the DC Forlani tried to put on the track the candidacy of the other "horse race" of the party. Which was Aldo Moro, former party secretary and prime minister, at that time Foreign Minister, for whom the Communists were also willing to vote, reciprocating the "strategy of attention" he openly practiced towards their party since 1968 . Forlani's attempt, as well as putting him in conflict with his own current, shattered against a very narrow majority of the Christian Democratic parliamentary groups, who by secret ballot, voting precisely on the new candidate for the Quirinale, preferred Leone for the availability already declared to vote for it by the Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats.
Elected in two ballots, having missed the first in the Montecitorio courtroom only by one vote, Leone was annoyingly indicated by some colleagues of his own party, to the point of complaining about it in a letter then written by the Quirinale to the official newspaper of the DC, as a favorite in the secret of the urn by the missini. "If someone favored me it was Santa Claus", Leone told me in those days, alluding to the Christmas atmosphere in which that race had now ended, with the parliamentarians eager to go home, And with Moro, moreover, personally involved to call friends disappointed in his lack of candidacy to vote in a disciplined manner for Leone. Moro was so friendly with whom he let himself go, in their meetings, to the vocal and mimicry imitation of the most senior party colleagues.
In protest against Leo's election, the socialists withdrew from the center-left majority. And Forlani, in agreement – behind the scenes – with the communists, who had voted for divorce but knew the opposition of a part of their base, Forlani took the ball to steer the crisis towards early elections in order to postpone a referendum of which he warned all the risks for the crusader shield. And Leone, who had already tried in vain as a senator to change the divorce law to circumvent the referendum test, indulged him.
The fears of Forlani, then personally dethroned by Fanfani as secretary, were confirmed in 1974, when the DC lost the referendum and gradually all the rest, despite the span of twenty years, and with the contribution of the judicial guillotine of the so-called "Clean hands".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/elezioni-anticipate-alle-porte/ on Sat, 09 Oct 2021 06:20:43 +0000.