... competing parties. Western political scientists always blamed the presence of a big Communist Party for this deep freeze. They loved to point out that the apparent instability of Italian politics (no government endured long) was really a condition of extreme stability.

Those who did not enthusiastically support one of the parties of the governing coalitions went to the next alternative, the Montanelli alternative: they held their noses and voted DC (or PSI, or PSDI, or PRI, or PLI). The result, the freeze, was the same.
Putting aside the question of cause-or-effect, the fact is that this electoral situation was in perfect harmony with the special relationship between the Italian and his/her party. (What follows was absolutely true of the Communist Party (PCI), largely true of the Christian Democrats (DC) and Socialists (PSI), and much less true of the small lay parties.)
The party touched almost all parts of the member’s life. It was one of his/her vital statistics, like birthplace or eye color. It was the guide (explicit or implicit) to what one read, watched, and how holidays were spent. An Italian Communist read (or at least carried around) the party daily (L’Unità). But if a Roman or Neapolitan wanted to see what was playing at the movies or read a sports page, then he would also buy the party’s very successful popular local afternoon tabloid, Paese Sera. No Communist family I ever met would admit to having failed to attend the Festa del’Unità in its town. The children rode the carnival rides and the parents heard (or claimed to have heard) some of the speech-making. The Festa even attracted the teenagers: the big cities had rock concerts, and smaller places had dancing to recorded music. (When one Festa organizer was asked for the political justification for luring teens with Elvis Presley and Louis Armstrong, he replied that “it’s the American counterculture.”)
The point is that the votes of these people were not available to the other parties. Their votes were locked in. This accounts for the just-going-through-the-motions of most of the campaigning. Did anyone seriously think that a poster showing nothing but the party symbol in three colors was going to change a voter’s mind? Party rallies were gatherings of the faithful (only): noisy, happy, combative, and unlikely to have any effect on how anyone voted. Television campaigning was largely limited to RAI election specials in which party leaders (one for each party, all getting equal time but with no guarantee that others would not be talking simultaneously) lined up across a (very broad) stage. It was fairly inexpensive. For most of the 35 years after the war, few votes were at stake.
This frozen condition had a brief period of (apparent) thaw in the 1970s (when the historic compromise was on the table), and was finally shattered 15 years later as the era of the floating voter was truly born. The reasons for both — the phony change and the real change — are crucial for understanding today’s party dynamics. We will explore them next.