... Romano Prodi in the 1990s), it’s time to cross some bridges to the rest of Italian politics.

One such bridge towered over all others, changing the landscape dramatically: the Compromesso storico [“Historic Compromise”] attempted in the 1970s. That was the effort of Italy’s two great post-war rivals, the Communists (PCI) and the Christian Democrats (DC), to join hands in the ruling of the country. The Compromesso appeared to breathe much different air from today’s politics. There is no hint of such cooperation today. The two great coalitions have just waged a hard-bitten, almost-no-holds barred struggle to do as much serious damage to each other as possible before today’s vote. Why, back when the Communists called themselves Communists, could these “atheist Marxists” move so close to that Christian Democratic Party which had closer Vatican ties than the others in the West and find, through the incense, a welcoming embrace? Should they not have been even farther apart, and more entrenched, than today’s housebroken Left and laicized Right?
It is true that the Christian Democratic leadership of the 1970s was showing signs of fatigue and despair at some of the country’s chronic problems, problems that seemed intractable without some cooperation from the Left and the labor unions. A key example was wage-indexing, which assured that the escalator carrying wages upward would always be a more powerful engine than any anti-inflation measures that were politically feasible for DC-led governments. So the flickering of the Christian Democratic flame was one part of the formula.
Another was the German model. Faced with elements of political and economic stalemate, the Federal Republic had just tried a “Great Coalition” of Christian Democrats and Socialists, a much bigger event than today’s tepid embrace. The experiment may have made the unthinkable thinkable, but should not have offered much encouragement to the Italians. It soon fell into disfavor with German journalists and voters, partly for a reason that would have been felt in Italy: it curtailed the workings of democracy by appearing to eliminate the voters’ most fundamental choice, that between Left and Right.
More important than either of these stimuli, however, was a word that, in the 1970s, was central to Italian political life. Each day’s newspapers seemed to have the word in at least one of their headlines. It put dread into the hearts of many Italians. The word was sorpasso, meaning the moment when the ascending PCI would actually surpass the Christian Democrats at the polls to become the largest party in Italy. Mostly this was just a psychological barrier, but one that would carry with it a legitimizing of the Communist demand for a share of governance, making it seem both just and inevitable. The Compromesso would have drained the significance out of the sorpasso. It also would most certainly have made hash of the idea of sorpasso by changing all the electoral totals in a most unpredictable way, as droves of both Communist and Christian Democratic voters would have deserted their parties in a grand huff over this “unprincipled” bridge to the opposition.
But was the idea of this great bridge really unprincipled? Did it really cut bloodily across policy lines so profoundly that both sides would have lost their souls? On the contrary, the two sides were moving substantively toward each other in unacknowledged ways that made the Compromesso not only thinkable, but rather logical. These were hard, specific, shifts, not a muzzy “converging parallelism,” and they helped shape today’s parties. Next week we will X-ray these Catholic and Communist brothers-in-philosophical arms.