During the first 40 years of Italy’ post-war Republic, it was always easy to spot a foreign journalist or professor who had just arrived. He would sit in the bar of the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto and speak of Italy’s political instability. That was the story to be covered or the problem to be analyzed.

Months later, in a less expensive bar (expense accounts have limits), the journalist would have learned that which soon became a cliché of academics studying Italy: Italy was not suffering from instability, but from too much stability. True, governments passed quickly through the revolving doors of Palazzo Chigi, but it was always a reshuffle of the same faces (Fanfani, who served as Italy’s premier six times, became Signor ri-eccolo, Mister Here-He-Comes-Again).
Nothing changed because the electoral numbers changed so little, with the effect on parties and elections that we explored in a previous column. It was the loud and momentous breaking of this ice-jam, and the reasons for it, that shaped today’s politics, and is a key to understanding it.
The story of this change is largely the story of the long trek of the Italian Communist Party from being a pre-war movement of clandestine cells of armed men and women to becoming the dominant power in a coalition occupied with seeking the votes of the bourgeoisie for such non-threatening (and non-party) political figures as Prodi and Rutelli. Although the numbers show that the ex-Communists – the Left Democrats (DS) – still have an absolute hegemony over the current Left coalition, even in the form of a renewed Ulivo, their room for maneuver is harshly limited for reasons we will explore.
Before following the Communist Party on its own long march, we must pause to note the principal cause of the frozen politics, and the moment when it appeared to be cracking.
A phenomenon such as Italy’s hyper-stability has many causes—reasons why it happened only in Italy among the major Western powers.
The political culture of life-long allegiance to a party as part of one’s way of life has already been described here, but that is both cause and effect of the single most important freezing factor. The Communists played, of course, a central role in the partisan movement during the dying days of Fascism, especially in the North. In the South and Sicily, the Allied armies rolled through in 1943 (leaving no time for effective partisan organization), but then, just south of Florence, they came to a halt.
For all the months that followed until the end of the war, the struggle in the North was left to Italians, and the only group with arms, significant numbers of militants and, most important, an organizational structure, was the Communists. In those months, a revolutionary group that was considered alien by many Italians (who saw Moscow pulling the strings) won its spurs as an important Italian political force deserving of a share in Italy’s post-war future.
The groundwork was thus laid for the PCI to become the largest Communist movement outside the Communist world. But it was still a movement, not a party. How it transformed itself will be explored next week.