Italy: Reunion near Rome

“In the modern world,” says Italy’s Vice Premier and Socialist Party Leader Pietro Nenni, “political movements are constituted less around general ideas and more around real problems, real demands.” Thus it was last week that Nenni’s Socialists, addressing themselves to a very real problem of votes, reunited with the Social Democratic Party of Italian President Giuseppe Saragat.

The reconciliation — combining Italy’s third and fifth largest parties — came 19 years after Saragat led his moderate, democratic faction out of the main par ty, in protest against a Nenni alliance with the Communists. Over the years, Soviet repression in Hungary and elsewhere changed Nenni’s mind about the Reds, and in 1957 he split with the Communists and began the first of his many talks with Saragat about reuniting the two parties. In 1963, when Nenni and Saragat joined the Christian Democrats in Italy’s center-left coalition government, the two party leaders finally began talking in earnest.

Last week both parties held separate congresses to ratify the reunion, and this week the single party, with the jaw-cracking label “P.S.I.-P.S.D.I. Unified,” will meet in the Sports Palace outside Rome to draw up a constitution. Representing some 6,000,000 voters, the new party will start life with 95 Deputies and 46 Senators—still far behind the Christian Democrats (260 Deputies, 134 Senators) and the Communists (166 Deputies, 83 Senators). Nenni, who will take over as the new party president, feels the simple fact of socialist unity will help with policies that appeal more and more to middle-class voters. The Socialists expect that the day will come when they can eat heavily into the strength of the powerful Christian Democrats.