It is appropriate, after a campaign in which the contestants charged each other with disloyalty to the rules of the game, the public weal, even the very institutions of the state, to understand how we got here from the mid-1970s, when the PCI was still Red and took phone calls from Moscow and the Christian Democrats, between phone calls from the Vatican and Washington, still tried to terrify It

alians (and allies) with the specter of Godless Marxism…and yet they made a serious, close-to-succeeding attempt to govern together.
Last week, we looked at the electoral factors that led to the idea of the “Historic Compromise,” the 1970s project to have a beleaguered Christian Democracy and a surging Communist Party join hands in the control room in Rome. (To some extent they already had done so. Later we’ll explore lotizzazione, the distributing of political spoils.) Even despite these electoral pressures, we are still talking about the Catholic political party in a great Catholic country and a Marxist party that only recently had come in from the cold of being an armed movement of embattled cells and had supported both Stalin and his interventions in Eastern Europe until it became absolutely impossible.
Practical politics aside, how could they possibly bridge the ideological and philosophical gap? The answer is that it was not so difficult, that they shared an astonishing stretch of common ground (more than most current politicos enjoy admitting), that they came close to being (the phrase catches in one’s throat) natural allies. Understanding this is fundamental to understanding the Center-Left coalition that prevailed in the elections.
We wrote last week of the sorpasso, the threat (as many saw it) that the Communists (PCI) might actually surpass the DC at the polls. In fact, in the 1970s, the PCI was already the largest seriously-coherent political party in Italy (along with being the largest Communist party in the West). This is because the Christian Democrats were splintered into a twisting tangle of “currents,” some named for their leaders, some for their place of founding, some for meaningless images. Those tied to leaders were often also tied to regions. There were, in most cases, some philosophic differences between these streams of the party, but often leadership and political weight/counterweight were more important. We will draw no map of this chaos, because that truly is past history. But it’s important to realize that in this shifting confusion of streams, as it crossed the landscape, some of the currents wandered well beyond the traditional riverbanks of Christian Democracy. Foreign journalists were apt to explain this diversity to their readers by saying that the only thing that held all these splinters together was their opposition to the Communists. But that was far from the truth.
The situation was too disorderly to allow us to speak of any coherent Left-Center-Right within the DC, but there was, nonetheless, a group of currents that was surprisingly open to the Communists. It is hard to call this loose bunch the “Left” of the DC, because they justified some of their positions by citing Church teachings and (as we shall see next week) even papal bulls. They had no true leader, although Aldo Moro became the central figure in their maneuvering.
So what did they share, after a fashion, with the Communists? Nothing less than much of both foreign and domestic policy. We’ll line them up next week.