ITALY: The Power of Love

Last week, on the 24th anniversary of Mussolini’s march on Rome, Fascist banners fluttered from Roman public buildings, pamphlets glorifying Il Duce showered on the streets of Milan and Naples, nostalgic Sicilian crowds chanted Giovinezza, the Fascist hymn. And in the nationwide municipal elections Guglielmo Giannini’s Uomo Qualunque (Common Man) Party registered a spectacular 70% gain over its total vote last June, ran second (behind a Communist-Socialist coalition) in Rome, third in Naples, first in Palermo.

How much of a Fascist was Giannini? Homo’s brisk leap from a weak fifth to at least a strong third among Italian parties made that Italy’s No. 1 political question. The pudgy onetime theatrical producer (who looks like a jovial Eric von Stroheim) denounced Mussolini, of course, but he also said: “You cannot govern without exercising dictatorial power.” His program was vague. On domestic questions it was a hash of the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Wallace and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but with a strong flavor of Huey Long. Playing no favorites, Giannini hailed the Republican sweep in the U.S. as a victory of “the uomo qualunque in America.” Sometimes his appeal was even broader: “We place our hope in the immense power of love, which is the only real force in the world.”

Observers were waiting for Giannini to augment the power of love with a version of the Black Shirts or the Storm Troopers. After last week’s election he ordered formation of political “action squads” to prevent similar Communist gangs from breaking up his meetings.

Meanwhile, Giannini’s sassy, satirical weekly Uomo Qualunque had gained the largest circulation in Italy by appealing to the disgruntled political orphans of Fascism. He had openly invited amnestied Fascists into the party and had given high position’s to the wealthier ones. Qualunquists figured that success at the polls would bring them further contributions from wealthy industrialists.

Giannini aspires to be the political voice of the Church as well as of Big Business. Last June he embraced Catholicism intensively; in one day Giannini, whose non-practicing Catholic father and English Protestant mother had never had him baptized, received four sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist and Matrimony (he remarried the woman to whom he had been wed in a civil ceremony years before).