ITALY: Battle on the Floor

After the dinner hour one quiet evening last week, Demo-Christian Deputy Oscar Scalfaro stood up in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and made a motion: let the House sit seven days a week to speed debate on the government’s electoral reform bill. Up popped Socialist Fellow Traveler Pietro Nenni to cry: “The majority is attempting a coup.” Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti, discarding his usual pose of blue-serge respectability, shouted: “This isn’t a Parliament. It is a bivouac of priests.” From the right came the reply: “Go back to your Soviet Parliament, Togliatti. Your game will be up there.” The fight was on.

Narrow Margins. As the two sides of the House made for each other, shouting curses and grabbing handy weapons, the speaker summoned help on a siren called la Martinella. A phalanx of strapping ushers rushed in. Prohibited from laying hands on the honorable members, the thin line of frock-coated ushers compromised by kicking shins. They were swept aside as the factions closed, fists waving, drinking glasses hurtling, chair legs thudding on skulls. From his seventh-row plush seat, Red Chief Togliatti, carefully guarded by a Red deputy, watched with a connoisseur’s interest. Premier Alcide de Gasperi, 71, in the front benches, prudently retired to safer ground.

The scuffle was part of a deadly earnest battle between De Gasperi’s government and its powerful Communist opposition (128 members). An election is coming with spring; the Demo-Christians expect to win by a hair (Italy is the only nation in Western Europe where the Communists have gained strength since 1948). Narrow margins might be tolerated in England, where the opposition is democratic; but could Italian democracy survive and effectively govern if the Communists really controlled Parliament?

De Gasperi’s electoral reform bill proposed that the winning party or coalition of parties be given a bonus of additional seats, sufficient to give it at least 63% of the total number of seats, enough for a working majority. If passing the bill was important to the Demo-Christians, defeating it was imperative to the Reds.

Cracked Heads. Communist Walter Audisio, who likes to boast that he was Mussolini’s executioner, sped to the clerk’s table, ripped away a microphone, scared off the clerks and tore up the parliamentary minutes. Spying an elderly Demo-Christian deputy who was grabbing an antique clock to save it, Audisio clubbed him to the floor. Tough Demo-Christian Deputy Giuseppe Bettiol tore the leg off a chair, advanced on Audisio and beat him into retreat.

After 20 minutes, peace returned to the chamber, now slopped with ink and blood and littered with glass shards, torn paper and shredded shirts. One usher went to the hospital with a brain concussion; a Red sported a two-inch-deep gash in his scalp; a Demo-Christian nursed a badly bruised abdomen; the House first-aid station impartially bandaged Red heads and court-plastered Demo-Christian faces.

The next morning, both sides proffered formal apologies. Deputies noted that their desks had been fastened to the floor, and inkwells prudently removed.