ITALIAN PEOPLE’S PARTY. - Political party, arisen after the First World War, with a strong democratic content, inspired by the doctrines of the Christian social school.
I. ORIGIN
It was founded by Fr. Luigi Sturzo together with a group of political men already known in Italian public and administrative life, who, after some preparatory meetings (in Nov. and Dec. 1918), on the evening of 18 Jan. 1919, from Rome, released to the press the first appeal to the Country and the text of the program. The appeal "to the free and the strong" was signed by a provisional committee composed of eleven members: Fr. Luigi Sturzo, Hon. Avv. Giovanni Bertini, Avv. Giovanni Bertone, Stefano Cavazzoni, Rag. Achille Grandi, Count Giovanni Grosoli, Hon. Dott. Giovanni Longinotti, Hon. Avv. Angelo Mauri, Avv. Umberto Merlin, Hon. Avv. Giulio Rodinò, Count Avv. Carlo Santucci. The committee temporarily assumed the direction of the new Party and designated Fr. Sturzo from the outset as political secretary.
The Party drew its motives from the antithesis between moderate Catholics and democratic Catholics which provoked - between 1904 and 1906 - the well-known crisis of the Christian Democracy (v.). Fr. Sturzo, ever since his speech at Caltagirone (29 Dec. 1905), had brought to light the synthesis of the vague aspirations of the Christian democrats, which often manifested themselves with intemperances aimed at asserting a doctrinal religious autonomism, thus giving powerful weapons into the hands of the conservatives to react against democratic action under the guise of defending orthodoxy. Even then, in order to operate effectively on the political and trade-union terrain in Italy, he had indicated the necessity of a party of a strictly national character, which would not involve in its attitudes the responsibility of the ecclesiastical authorities; but which, acting autonomously and with its own forces on the political and social terrain, could assert, precisely on this terrain of historical reality and contingencies, fundamentally Christian principles. He, therefore, at the end of 1918, in laying the foundations of the P. P. I., did nothing but take up again the logical line of his own thought. The Party links itself historically to Christian social doctrine, from Ozanam to Toniolo, but principally to the Rerum Novarum, and politically to the political praxis of the Christian social parties of central Europe and to the Christian Democracy (v.).
The First World War had not only changed boundaries between people and people, not only resolved old problems and raised new question marks in the international field, but within each nation had brought about profound social changes. Between the two dominant Parties - liberal and socialist - there was room for a new party, for the affirmation of a new democratic concept of the State, based not on the dictatorship of any class whatsoever, even the proletarian one, but based on the decentralization of all functions and all activities, on respect for all liberties, on the rigorous application of justice. The working masses adhering to the "Italian Confederation of Workers" pressed to wedge themselves between the two then dominant Parties and to attempt the reorganization of Italy on the basis of Christian justice.
With 4 Nov. 1918 Italy entered the armistice and, on the 17th, Fr. Luigi Sturzo delivered his "Milan speech" on the problems of the postwar period, in intimate ideal connection with the program of the P. P. I. The principal characteristic of the Milan speech lies in having marked the fundamental and necessary reconquests of liberty in order then to be able to act effectively on the modern world.
II. PROGRAM
L. Sturzo and his friends took up again the problem of regional decentralization and placed it on political and parliamentary ground, setting it on a firm national basis, holding firmly to the anti-pantheistic concept of the State as an organ of direction, coordination, vigilance and protection, making the region a unit not divergent, but convergent toward the State, recognizing it as a specific unit.
A vigorous campaign was conducted by the Party, under the Nitti ministry in the first half of 1919, for proportional representation, which through considerable difficulties had a victorious epilogue in Parliament with the approval of the Micheli report. The new electoral system replaced competition among persons and local cliques with that of parties, that is, of ideas. The general political elections, based on proportional representation, of Nov. 16, 1919, with the P. P. I.'s conquest of 100 seats and with the success of 156 Socialist deputies, placed on the ground the discussion of a problem already several times presented on the political scene: the problem of collaboration of liberals and democrats with the socialists. An agreement between Popolari and Socialists was also considered; but, in this regard, d. Sturzo, questioned on the subject, pointed out how at that time events were not yet ripe for such collaboration.
When Bolshevik propaganda began to assert itself more vigorously, the Party's leadership felt the need to launch a manifesto to the country, a true anti-Bolshevik proclamation that asked the masses to "shun every anarchoid violence" and that invited Parliament and the government to the rapid resolution of the greatest moral, social and economic problems.
The first Congress of the P. P. I., held in Bologna on June 14, 1919 under the presidency of Alcide De Gasperi, reaffirmed the non-theoretical but technical, economic and legislative cornerstones, aimed at curbing Bolshevik agitations; it called for the juridical recognition of organized classes, precisely in order to set in motion the resolution of all conflicts between class and class toward peaceful orientations, through stable organs of representation, the juridical recognition of trade organizations – in order to give them responsibility for their own acts – effective freedom of organization – that is, parity of treatment of all organizations before the law, precisely in order to remove anarchoid violence between organizations and organizations –; it called finally for the transformation of the wage-labor contract and the introduction of worker profit-sharing and worker shareholding, in order to make the interests of capital and labor solidary and to abolish the struggles that disturb social peace and are ruinous to national production. At the second Congress of the P. P. I. – held in Naples from Apr. 8 to 11, 1920 – the debates were extremely lively, but the central programmatic line, represented by the political secretary, had taken shape with such precision that the Party's internal consolidation proceeded without deviations. D. Sturzo summarized the Party's aims in three points: to bring down state centralization, to restore consciousness to natural organisms, to stir up individual energies. Passing then to the discussion on school reform, conclusive motions were voted which, while outlining a vast program of reform of public schools, insisted above all on the necessity of instituting the state examination for schools of every grade. The agrarian problem was also extensively discussed; the report presented started from numerous principles: the social function of the land, the problem of production, the necessity of favoring the joining of property with labor; the necessity of regional decentralization and of the representation of the agricultural classes, etc. A notably bold programmatic complex, from which, however, the concept of confiscation, even partial, of property for the benefit of the collectivity was excluded. The political and parliamentary situation, particularly grave in that period, was examined during the last days of the Congress.
The P. P. I. imposed itself in the Chambers and in the government through the work of its well-prepared politicians and organizers: in the very front rank Filippo Meda, and then Angelo Mauri, Giuseppe Micheli, architect of the first agrarian reform, Giulio Rodinò, Giovanni Battista Bertone, Fulvio Milani, Salvatore Aldisio, Antonino Anile, Giovanni Gronchi, Giovanni Maria Longinotti, Umberto Tupini, Mario Augusto Martini, Francesco Degni, Mario Cingolani, Vincenzo Tangorra, Umberto Merlin and others. The figure of Alcide De Gasperi was already emerging. The Party's leadership was flanked by a central office, in which the two deputy political secretaries Mario Cingolani and Giuseppe Spataro successively lent their work and lastly, in the private secretariat, Mario Scelba, and by a press office directed by d. Giulio de' Rossi (a noble figure of priest and scientist) with the collaboration of Igino Giordani, Giuseppe Fuschini, Vincenzo Mangano and Giuseppe Petrocchi. The latter especially for the problems of school and culture. In 1920, during the two great postal-telegraph and railway strikes, the Party sided with the "white organizations" opposed to the strike; at the end of Aug. and in the first days of Sept. 1920, in the invasion of the factories, it supported the "white" organization, the "Sindacato nazionale operai metallurgici," and gave it political value, defending it against the reprisals of the "reds."
The Fascist movement begins to grow and to threaten the socialist and Popolari organizations, political and trade-union. Il Popolo nuovo, organ of the P. P. I., deplores the government's inertia.
III. ELECTORAL TRIALS
On 7 April 1921 Hon. Giolitti dissolved the Chamber and summoned the electoral colleges. The P. P. I. took a very decided position in the struggle, raising its voice for national discipline, social reconciliation, and the moral, juridical and economic reconstruction of the country. In the electoral battle Fr. Sturzo spoke at the Augusteo and then in Turin and Palermo, upholding the restoration of the authority of the State and respect for the laws.
The resonance of the P. P. I.'s victory in the elections of 15 May 1921, in which it won 107 seats, was profound, notwithstanding the open struggle of Giolitti, who allied himself with the Fascists in order to fight the Popolari and the Socialists. The Tovini order of the day, also signed by Hon. Cavazzoni, secretary of the parliamentary group of the Popolari, marked the position of the P. P. I., which stood in the middle between the extreme wings.
Once the strike of the employees had ended, L. Sturzo, in an interview, after indicating a series of reforms, did not approve the rebellious attitude of the state employees, recognizing that the moral crisis which had been reached was due to a state hypertrophy "willed, cultivated, fed, and endured by the ruling classes and by the liberal democracies." During the Bonomi ministry, the action carried out by the P. P. I. was clear and consistent, aimed at the defense of the State, threatened from opposite sides, and at social reconstruction. In Aug. 1921 the National Council of the Party laid down firm directives. The Gronchi order of the day affirmed that any cooperation with other political forces could come about only on the basis of the progressive, profound renewal of economic and political institutions and through clear programmatic positions.
At the Congress of Venice (20 Oct. 1921) the P. P. I., having noted that "from the Congress of Naples onward the collaboration of the parliamentary group of the Popolari with the various ministries had been imposed by the duty of making the parliamentary institution function and of cooperating in the restoration of the authority of the State, and that the failure to implement the programmatic points set as a pact of alliance (and especially agrarian reform, administrative proportional representation, state examinations, cooperative legislation) was due not only to the slow and obstructed functioning of the Chamber, but also to the succession of political and electoral events," reconfirmed this limit to collaboration with the political groupings. At the Congress of Venice Sturzo reported extensively on the problem of the region, setting it out on organic foundations. The report remains authoritative on the subject even today. A few days before the Chamber reopened, in Jan. 1922, Fr. Sturzo, commemorating the third anniversary of the birth of the Party, delivered a speech in Florence on the crisis and renewal of the State, emphasizing the deficiencies, weaknesses and errors of the policy of the ruling classes, fully addressing the problem of the State and suggesting a bold solution. When the Bonomi ministry presented its resignation to the Chamber because of Giolittian maneuvers, the directorate of the parliamentary group of the Popolari unanimously voted an order of the day in which it established that in the event of a crisis there should remain "as preconditions to its completion, on the part of the group of the Popolari, the definition of a policy for the government and of a program of legislative work agreed in advance with the responsible organs of the groups, the constitution of a permanent majority committee, and proportionality in participation in the ministry in relation to the numerical strength of those same groups." Il Popolo nuovo of 5 March 1922, dwelling on the events, noted how the P. P. I. – after having been the first, from Oct. 1920 onward, to sound the alarm against the financial projects of Hon. Giolitti, and after having agreed with the Bonomi ministry on a suspension of the application of the law on the naming of shares – had raised again the economic and financial question with regard to whether or not Giolitti would return to power, forcing everyone to declare themselves in favor of a change of policy.
Since the parliamentary situation was exceedingly confused, the King rejected Bonomi's resignation and induced him to appear again before the Chamber (16 Feb. 1922). But the Cabinet was torpedoed once more by Giolitti, who was attempting to seize power again. The Popolari could not lend themselves to these machinations, especially considering the very grave internal situation, almost revolutionary, provoked by the Fascists and the Communists. Accordingly the Party ranged itself resolutely against Giolitti as the exponent of the degeneration of Italian democratic politics, accused also, says de' Rossi, of having "assumed the guise of defender of the lay State against invading clericalism" and of underground divorceist maneuvers. Here the famous "veto" intervened against the political reincarnation of Giolitti on the part of the Party directorate and of the parliamentary group of the Popolari. Giolitti finally understood the futility of his own dream and fell back on the weak and uncertain Hon. Facta. The solution, instead, could only have been that of a Meda, Amendola, Turati cabinet. Unhappily Meda, the leader of the Popolari, drew back. But Hon. Giolitti was old and tired, the methods he had employed in the past were no longer effective; he had behind him no consent of the people, and the agreements with the Fascists in the elections of 1921 to fight the Popolari and the legalitarian Socialists had compromised him before their masses. And the man he would have had to bring down or bend, namely Mussolini, was superior to him in audacity and unscrupulous inventiveness, sustained as he was by an armed organization that had infiltrated even the upper spheres of the army, and by a movement without scruples or limits of action.
IV. IN THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC CRISIS
On the policy of the new Facta ministry, the National Council of the P. P. I. urged the Party directorate and the parliamentary group to work with the government so that, in the defense of constitutional liberties and in the safeguarding of public order against a renewed outbreak of agrarian-fascist violence by armed squads, it might make "the force of the authority of the State and the moral reasons of civilized life felt upon the public conscience."
When the Facta ministry fell in July 1922 the crisis was laborious, and the King reconfirmed Facta, who presented himself again with the same ministry to the Chamber. It was then that the Popular Party imposed the approval of agrarian reform (colonization of the latifundia), approved by the Chamber on 10 Aug. 1922. This brought about an intensification of the fascists' struggle, allied as they were with the agrarians, and the occupations of town halls, the burning of cooperatives, and assaults in the streets and squares. The National Council of the P. P. I., meeting in Rome in an emergency session on 20 Oct. 1922, issued an appeal for a return to internal peace. B. Mussolini, who from '21 to '22 had prepared to enter a coalition government, had then set his sights on a national unity government pivoting on the right; now, while conducting negligible negotiations with Giolitti, Orlando and Salandra, he aimed instead at a total takeover. The fascist Congress of Naples was merely a prelude to the march on Rome. The Popular ministers and the political secretary, who from the very first appearances had understood where fascism was aiming, tried to signal the danger to the president of the Council Facta, without succeeding in shaking his confidence.
Already toward the end of 1920 Fr. Sturzo had defined fascism as a movement sprung from the war, to which could be granted the merit of the rehabilitation of the war and of the victory, which the socialists had been wrong to disparage; but it was a movement, born socialistoid, revolutionary-anticlerical, that was coming to lean on the "agrarians" of the Po Valley. Exploiting national and patriotic sentiment, it would serve as a pretext for the industrialism and agrarianism of Northern Italy to polarize around itself the forces of reaction and of the conservation of privilege against the demands of the working classes. "The government — added Fr. Sturzo — with its classic tactic of contingentism and adaptation, will second and help fascism, and then will be its dependent and its victim."
V. WITH FASCISM IN GOVERNMENT
After Mussolini's rise to power and the formation of the first coalition ministry, in which the Liberals, the Popolari and the Social Democrats had entered together with the Nationalists and the Fascists, Fr. Sturzo did not accept collaboration and reserved the right to bring the question before the Congress; he declared that he would leave the Popolari group in the Chamber free to carry out the experiment
(on the group's own personal responsibility); this was the spirit of the speech of 1 Dec. 1922 in Turin.
The collaboration could not last: the break came shortly afterwards. Sturzo had given Mussolini no blank cheque. The autonomy and dignity of the P. P. I. had to remain intact at any cost. Hence clarifications and stocktakings: reservations and criticisms whenever necessary. The critical little articles published from time to time by Fr. Sturzo, his Turin speech of 20 Dec. 1922, provoked ever graver reactions, and the report to the national Congress of Turin of 12 Apr. 1923 marked the definitive withdrawal of the Popolari from the government.
The Congress of Turin was an "act of daring" on the part of the Party leadership, and the timid well-thinking did not want it to be held, but Fr. Sturzo had grasped its absolute necessity and indeed foreseen its historical function. Meanwhile Il Popolo had come out, the daily newspaper of the P. P. I. directed by Giuseppe Donati. An organ of battle, Il Popolo contributed to the clarification of the Party and to its differentiation, down to the definitive break from collaboration with the first Mussolini ministry, culminating in open opposition.
Once the attempt to bring the Fascist revolution within the orbit of the constitution and of legality had failed, and once the electoral reform of 23 July 1923 had been approved, despite the efforts of the Popolari group authoritatively led by De Gasperi — a reform which ab initio assured a majority to the Mussolini government — the P. P. I. passed definitively into opposition, notwithstanding the defection of a small group of its deputies. Once the legislature was closed on 24 Jan. 1924 (in December the first assault against Amendola had taken place in Rome, and other very grave episodes of violence against Catholic and Popolari organizations followed one another), the political elections called for 6 Apr. 1924 took place in a heated climate of violence, with the decisive victory of the Fascist Party. "With these elections, the position of the P. P. I. in Italian public life undergoes a radical change," notes Jacini, "no longer a party of government and of the centre, no longer the fulcrum of the parliamentary majority, free in its movements, formally released as well from a collaboration that weighed on it more heavily every day, it finds itself placed alongside, with integrative functions, a growing host of Liberals, Democrats and Socialists, forming with them the varied body of the constitutional opposition committed to defending the statutory liberties."
But it is necessary to go back to a highly significant fact in the life of the Party. Fr. Sturzo, overwhelmed by the reaction, submitted his resignation on 10 July 1923 to the Party's National Council, which had gathered in those days, in the thick of the opposition conducted by the parliamentary group against the electoral reform and against the Fascist government. He declared that he was not moved to this by divergences with the parliamentary group, but so as no longer to give his adversaries a pretext for equivocating about the relations of the P. P. I. with the Church and thus involving the latter in the inevitable political clashes that the Party had to face for the defence and the realization of its ideal and practical programme. The National Council then decided to entrust the functions of the political secretariat to a triumvirate, to which Hon. Rodinò was appointed as president, Hon. Gronchi as secretary and the lawyer Spataro as vice-secretary. The impression within the Party was intense, and the demonstration of homage to Fr. Sturzo was imposing. His resignation was explained in various ways: in government circles as a success for Mussolini, in other circles as a prelude to a stiffening of the Popolari group in opposition; but it had become inevitable inasmuch as the government's directives of persecution made it feared that Fascist hostility against Fr. Sturzo and the Party might extend to the clergy in general. Meanwhile there occurred the killing of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti (10 June 1924) and of Fr. Giovanni Minzoni, archpriest of Argenta (14 Aug. 1924).
After his resignation and until the day of his exile, Fr. Sturzo intensely resumed his studies and gave life to the Bollettino di scienze sociali e politiche, a lively critical review of examination and debate of the principal problems that were stirring in the field of Italian and foreign social and political culture. When Fr. Sturzo left Rome for London on 25 Oct. 1924, the secretariat and the leadership of the Party were assumed by Alcide De Gasperi, who with the help of Spataro maintained and strengthened the ranks until he was overwhelmed by violence.
The Popolari gave very valuable assistance to the political movement known as that of the Aventine, provoked by the political crimes and by other very grave liberty-destroying attacks carried out by the black squads, which made the exercise of parliamentary power by the opposition impracticable.
The Matteotti campaign was for the Party's newspaper, Il Popolo, its greatest title of honour. Donati, with his denunciation against De Bono, presented to the High Court of Justice, and with a series of minutely documented articles, denounced in an irrefutable manner the political responsibilities of the crime. He showed the same ardour in the journalistic campaign and in the denunciation against Balbo for the assassination of Fr. Minzoni (after the Matteotti crime, De Gasperi, who was one of the most active members of the Aventine steering committee, together with Amendola and Di Cesarò went to the Quirinal to present to the King the opposition's demands against the crime).
VI. LAST CONGRESS
The last Congress of the P. P. I. was held in Rome, in the spring of 1925, in a narrow hall near S. Andrea della Valle, where De Gasperi gathered the faithful friends. After an examination of the situation it was concluded that, since every possibility of action or reaction had by then been removed, nothing remained but to affirm one's own moral independence. On Dec. 14, 1925, De Gasperi too was forced to resign as political secretary of the Party and to withdraw into private life.
On Jan. 25, 1927, the dissolution of the Chamber was decreed, and the popular parliamentary group, already crushed by the measure depriving the Aventine deputies of their parliamentary mandate, ceased to exist even in theory. Most of the Party's leading figures were deprived of their passport and of the license to carry arms and were forced to accept an identity card bearing their fingerprints. They were barred from any public office, and only professional activity was allowed them, within very narrow limits.
VII. HISTORICAL FUNCTION OF THE PARTY
To sum up in a synthetic judgment the historical function of the P. P. I., one may legitimately affirm that the Party, by transferring the principles of the Christian social school to an autonomous setting, gave a Christian-democratic consciousness and a sense of responsibility to a notable fraction of Italian Catholics, withdrawing them from the tutelage and minority status imposed by the ruling political classes; and on the other hand it helped to disengage the Church from the conflicts of the parties.
Today's Christian Democratic Party is nothing but its heir and continuator.