COMPLEX NATURE OF ITALIAN POLITICS

By: Elizabeth LugonesAlyssa CampaRyann Puente

Sydney Howard

Principal Parties During Trasformismo

● Liberals○ Made up of a series of informal personal groupings. ○ Wasn’t a structured party

● Radicals○ Often divided among themselves but are generally in favor of more economic freedom,

lower taxes, and reform of the monarchy and the military● Republican Party

○ Formed in 1895 with a political agenda like the radicals but due to personal reasons they weren’t able to work out.

Principal Parties (cont.)Political Parties with mass support in 1900-14

● The Socialist Party○ Founded in 1892, it had built a base in the northern industrial towns and had 32 seats in

the Chamber of Deputies. ● Catholic Involvement

○ Frightened by socialism, Catholic’s became more involved in Italian politics.● The Nationalist Party

○ A right-wing Nationalist Party emerged in the years right before 1914. It began as many felt that the Liberal State had failed to build a proper Italian nation.

○ They were also affected by feelings of inferiority since Italy was left in the race to build an overseas empire.

Principal Parties (cont.)Post WWI Political Parties

● The Popular Party ○ It embraced Catholics of different political views and was more an uneasy alliance than an

actual party. It was likely to command mass voting support in a Catholic country with a powerful Church hierarchy.

● The Liberal groups ○ Found it difficult to find allies and were committed to radical political and economic

changes.

● The Socialist Party○

Complex nature of Italian PoliticsItalian Politics before 1914

● Following unification Italy was based on the model of a parliamentary monarchy

○ Its parliamentary constitution was created with an upper house, the Senate, and an elected lower house, the Chamber of Deputies

○ The Senate was less active because of the older age of members.○ The Chamber, elected every five years, was the more powerful of the houses.

● In Parliament, political parties were weak and so politicians were encouraged to join large political coalitions by being bribed with favors which became known as trasformismo.

Complex nature of Italian politics (cont.) ● The political system was threatened due to an emergence of parties with mass

support ○ None of the social and economic changes from trasformismo led to political breakdown

but, the political system was becoming increasingly difficult for the liberal politicians to manage.

● WWI Pressure on Political Life○ War created deep divisions among the Italian people, between the war’s supporters and

those who opposed it.

○ These divisions were still there at the war’s end which was fatal to the continuation of the traditional Liberal State.

○ By creating new social and economic problems, creating disagreement among Italy’s

political leaders, and by creating a terrible electorate in the country, the war intensified the danger of political breakdown.

Complex nature of Italian politics (cont.) ● After WWI, the old liberal leaders struggled to keep trasformismo.

Electoral changes they they introduced after the war encouraged further political instability.

● The 1919 election was a disaster for the Liberals and the days of trasformismo were coming to an end.

● The 1921 election changed the political scene as Mussolini and the fascists rose, coming out with 35 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. It was a huge turning-point for the Liberal State.

Group Hostile to DemocracyRed Menace

● As the government became increasingly unpopular, many Italians turned to support the Socialist Party and the Catholic Popular Party in the elections of 1919. The Socialist Party won more than one-third of all votes and became the largest single party in the Chamber of Deputies.

● Encouraged by the success of the general election, the Socialists were prepared to make more strikes. They reached their climax in September of 1920 when the General Confederation of Labour called for a general strike. During the strike the workers took over more than six hundred factories and established soviets on the Russian model to rule a number of industrial towns in northern Italy.

● Although the Socialists had established their control over a number of towns in the North, they failed to seize power in Italy.

● Two reasons to their failure to seize power:a. The leaders of the General Confederation of Labour were mainly interested in the improvement of

workers' livelihood. When the Italian government promised a 20% wage increase to the workers, the Confederation was satisfied and decided to call off the strike.

b. The Socialists lacked the support of the peasants because they proclaimed socialization of all land. Early in 1921 the Socialist threat was over. The Socialist Party also split into several factions. About one-third of the members withdrew to form a Communist Party.

Individuals Hostile to DemocracyBenito Mussolini

● In 1915, Mussolini was attacked by the Socialist Party for favouring war on the side of the Allies. He left the party and served as a soldier until he was wounded. After his recovery, he returned to Milan as an editor of his own newspaper 'The People of Italy'.

● In March 1919, he formed the Milan fascio. It had no clear-cut programme except a belief in action. It only had vague ideas about radical reforms.

● It seemed that Mussolini had not completely discarded his early socialist thought. The property class did not like his radical party programme. In the elections of November 1919 for the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini and one of his close associates failed to win a seat for themselves. By the end of the war, through his own experience as an editor, Mussolini had learnt the power of propaganda in mustering support from the masses.

● For propaganda purpose, Mussolini advocated:○ universal suffrage○ the abolition of the Senate○ land for the peasants○ improvement of workers' conditions○ a strong foreign policy.

Individuals Hostile to Democracy● During his rule Mussolini pursued a vigorous foreign policy. The army nearly doubled in size—from 175,000 men to

275,00 men. ● There were several reasons for this vigorous foreign policy:

○ Mussolini wanted to establish in the Mediterranean a modern Roman Empire, rivalling that of the ancient Caesars. ○ A successful foreign policy might distract the Italians from their miserable conditions at home. ○ Like most of his countrymen, Mussolini was disappointed with the small territorial gains following the First World

War and the humiliating treatment by the powers at the Paris Peace Conference. ○ Mussolini wanted more territories to settle the surplus Italian population and to acquire raw materials for her

industries. ○ Fascist doctrines preached national glory. Italians should expand to show their national greatness

Groups Supportive of DemocracySocialist Party

● At the start of the 20th century, the Socialist Party (PSI) chose not to strongly oppose the governments led by five-time Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. This helped to establish the PSI as a mainstream Italian political party by the 1910s.

● Despite the party's improving electoral results, the PSI remained divided into two major branches, the Reformists and the Maximalists.

● The Reformists, led by Filippo Turati, were strong mostly in the unions and the parliamentary group. ● The Maximalists, led by Costantino Lazzari, were affiliated with the London Bureau of socialist groups,

an international association of left-wing socialist parties.● In 1912, the Maximalists were led by Benito Mussolini prevailed at the party convention and this led to

the split of the Italian Reform Socialist Party..● The Socialist’s refusal to support the war led to its decision of either leaving or being purged from the

party, such as Mussolini who had begun to show sympathy to the national syndicalist cause. ● A number of the national syndicalists expelled from the PSI would have become members of Benito

Mussolini's National Fascist Party.

Groups Supportive of DemocracyThe Popolari

● The Popolari were one of the leading oppositional forces to Benito Mussolini’s plan to take over the Italian Parliament.

● Mussolini, in an attempt to destroy Parliament, tried to get the Chamber of Deputies to agree to an electoral reform, which would have guaranteed the Fascist Party two-thirds of all votes cast in future elections; the Popolari were a leading force against the measure.

● This put the party at odds with the Fascists, creating sufficient reason for the fascist-sympathizing Pope Pius XI to issue a decree, which ordered all catholic priests to resign from the Popolari and all of the political posts that the priests had held.

Democracy failed in Italy by 1922 as it proved itself incapable of coping with crisis

The factors which resulted in the failure of Democracy in Italy were:

● The long-term political weaknesses of the Italian State● The political confusion of the 1919-22 period

The long-term political weaknesses of the Italian State

● The weakness of the political parties meant that the political life, revolving around a few leading liberal politicians, was very unstable. Short-lived coalition governments dominated politics until the emergence of new parties - socialist and Catholic - made these more difficult to form.

● The government was controlled by corrupt politicians, called the party bosses. They controlled the elections by bribing the voters. Once they were in power, they were more interested in making personal gains for themselves than in solving the social and economic problems of the people.

The long-term political weaknesses of the Italian State

Leaders like Giolitti, Salandra, Facta and Orlando actively disliked one another. Because of this, the three Italian governments between May 1921 and October 1922 were fragile and unable to introduce the decisive measures needed to cope with the industrial disruption and the collapse of law and order.

Italy was dominated by a northern-based political and social elite who controlled the government through a system known as trasformismo – coalitions of factions or interest groups rather than political parties. They were resented by those who lived in the rural, poverty-stricken south and, increasingly, by the industrial workers in the north as well.

Giovanni Giolitti was Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921.

Antonio Salandra was a conservative Italian politician who served as the 33rd Prime Minister of Italy between 1914 and 1916

Luigi Facta was the last Prime Minister of Italy before the leadership of Benito Mussolini.

Vittorio Emanuele Orlando known for representing Italy in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference with his foreign minister Sidney Sonnino.

The political confusion of the 1919-22 period

The system of liberal coalitions broke down in the political conditions after the end of the war. The liberals needed new partners to enable the system to go on working and yet they did not want to work with the socialists whom they saw as a potentially revolutionary danger to the state.

The Liberals led most of the pre- and post-war Italian governments, maintaining themselves in power by doing deals with fellow Liberals. They were creating deals based on personalities instead of political programmes.

The political confusion of the 1919-22 period

The lack of an electable central political party- able to command a parliamentary majority and committed to a specific political programme.

The introduction of votes for all in 1918 created an electorate that was much more difficult to control or persuade to stay within the normal bounds of traditional party loyalty.

Proportional Representation had led to a plethora of disparate parties, and ensured that there was a series of ineffectual coalition governments. Proportional Representation gave disproportionate power to small, special-interest parties, like the Fascists.

How secure was democracy in Italy in 1922?Italian political life by 1922 had reached its breaking point. Democracy was not secure at all due to:

-Weakness of the Liberal State caused by the growth of new political parties before 1914 which helped undermine the coalition politics responsible for making the system functioning

-The war and its aftermath creating a division among those who supported the ruling elite and those opposed to it. Co-operation against a common enemy now seemed impossible

-Post-war extremist parties were on the rise and violence became the norm.

Political Miscalculation

The new Fascist movement that was seen by influential sections of Italian society as the best hope to put an end to the current political crisis of the Liberal State

-King Victor Emmanuel appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister in a coalition government in an attempt to preserve law and order.

-This outcome is a result of the old political class choosing to ignore the daily acts of fascist violence and instead seeing Mussolini’s appointment as another turn in the game of transformismo politics.

-Fascism’s success could have been prevented if the King or any one of the liberal politicians (I.E. Giolitti, Facta, etc) had acted differently and considered fascism a threat to democracy.