ITALY: Il Motorino

Just four days after the rickety government of Christian Democratic Premier Fernando Tambroni toppled last week, Italy’s politicians agreed on a new Premier: Amintore Fanfani, 52, the stubby. hard-driving Tuscan professor of economics who has twice before headed Christian Democratic governments.

For Italy, this speed was almost unprecedented. But the politicians had been scared by the riots the Communists had staged a fortnight ago to protest the 24 neo-Fascist votes that gave the Tambroni government its majority. The riots had not amounted to much in themselves. But they vividly demonstrated that the Communists had at last latched on to a popular issue after years of political isolation, shocked the squabbling non-Communist parties into amenability. Even his own Christian Democratic Party deserted Tambroni. Explained a spokesman: “This government no longer corresponds to the political situation.”

Known as Il Motorino (Little Motor), Fanfani has, in addition to his Christian Democrats, the pledged support of three center parties, the Saragat Socialists, Liberals, and Republicans, ensuring him a majority in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies without the help of the neoFascists. But any one of the supporting parties could clog up Il Motorino’s gas line should he show any of the leftist economic notions or excessive Catholic zeal that have toppled his governments in the past. A major clause in the coalition agreement negotiated by Fanfani provides that if any one of the minority parties withdraws its support, the government will resign whether it can muster a parliamentary majority or not. Thus though the atmosphere is, as Turin’s La Stampa editorialized, “one of relief and even euphoria” because the Communists have been shoved back into isolation, the birth certificate of Fanfani’s new government practically has the cause of its death written into it.

Yet the inevitable fall of Fanfani’s government will not basically change Italy’s stultified political structure. Political power is the exclusive monopoly of the Christian Democrats, backed by the Roman Catholic Church and a shifting coalition of minority parties determined to prevent the Communists, Italy’s second largest party, from attaining power. In office for the past seven years, the Christian Democrats have turned complacent, done little to redress the squalid poverty of much of Italy, become a flaccid party of petty corruption. The factories of the north are booming, and Italy is gradually developing a thriving middle class. But the arid south and the poor in the city slums have little share in this prosperity, and no strong anti-Communist opposition party exists to represent the dissatisfied and underprivileged.