The Battle Continues

On the night after the election, until the small hours of the morning, Rome's people crowded around the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna. laughing and slapping each other's backs. "Let's go home!" cried one woman. "The danger is over." While Romans celebrated democracy's victory, swarms of the city's ragged children roamed the streets, tearing down election posters in order to sell them as scrap for a few lire. It was a sharp reminder that the danger was far from over. The victors still had a price to pay for their 18 million anti-Communist votes. The price was land and bread for Italy's workers and peasants.

The Score. The Christian Democrats' landslide was bigger than anything they had expected.

P: Christian Democrats: 12,700,000 (48.7% of the popular vote). Chamber of Deputies: 307 out of 575 seats. Senate: 151 out of 350 seats.

P: Popular Front: 8,000,000 (30.7%). Chamber: 182 seats. Senate: 115.

P: Anti-Communist (Saragat) Socialists: 1,800,000 (7.1%). Chamber: 33 seats. Senate: 25.

P: Other anti-Communist Parties: 3,600,000 (13.5%). Chamber: 52 seats. Senate: 59*

Saddest cases were the left-wing Socialists, who under Pietro Nenni had joined the Communists on the single Popular Front ticket. Said tough former Socialist Minister Giuseppe Romita, urging a break with Nenni: "The Popular Front absorbed and nullified our party."

No Waterloo. At first the Communists seemed stunned by their defeat. The victors gleefully taunted them with banners: "Togliatti--do you understand? Go back to Russia!" Rome chuckled over the story of the two Communist election judges at Ischia: when the returns were counted, only one Communist vote had been cast. Each judge called the other a traitor; both wound up in the hospital.

Communist Labor Boss Giuseppe di Vittorio publicly admitted his distress that Italian Reds had been obliged to attack the Marshall Plan. He said he would ask the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions to let workers in each country decide for themselves what stand to take on U.S. aid. "When someone wants to help you," he said, "it is ridiculous to slap him in the face."

But soon a message went out from Communist headquarters to "stop moping." Palmiro Togliatti gave out the official excuse for the defeat: the elections had not been free--the U.S. and the Vatican had interfered. Said Luigi Longo, who commands the Red partisans: "The election was not a Waterloo, but just a lost battle . . . The relations between the government and the people will go through dangerous tensions . . . We will collect the fruits of our labors at some future date . . ."

Fear still flickered through Italy on the morning after the election. Bologna, the Red capital, seemed like a dead city, its medieval porticos empty, its gleaming pastry shops deserted. In Milan's Cathedral Square, 25,000 Communist partisans staged a demonstration (despite a government ban) ; they were dispersed by police, who fired machine guns into the air, and by a timely rainstorm. One policeman was killed. But beaming Minister of the Interior Mario Scelba was sure that his security forces could maintain order.

"The Workers Are Us." Alcide de Gasperi, looking happier than he had in years, cried with shaking voice: "We are not reactionaries. Every social reform which has been promised will be made." Of the Popular Front's 8,000.000 voters he said: "We are working to convert them." He also indicated that Italy would join the Western Union, but hoped that her peace treaty would first be softened.

The trouble was that reforms would not be easily carried out. Many De Gasperi supporters were dead against them. Giovanni Elken, Jewish secretary of the Christian Democratic Party in Bologna, explained: "Six million of our votes were cast by people who were just antiCommunists. I've even talked to a monarchist who believed that we will restore the monarchy. Yet it is our essential moral duty to bring about reforms that will raise wails from these six millions." Said Father "X," the Milan priest who organized Catholic partisans and kept machine guns in his study last winter (TIME, Dec. 29): "We must be with the workers. They are 'us.' The industrialists and landowners are 'they.' "

At Sesto Implese, on a Communist-run collective farm, a peasant said what millions of Italians felt: "We are now waiting to see what the government does with its chance. We know that we have to get up early in the morning to work. What we want is to be sure that there will be work to fill the day, furrows to plow, and bread to earn." The Communists' greatest fear was that the Christian Democrats would give that peasant what he wanted.

* In the national election pool, one Luigi Prato, of Valenza, a pessimistic member of the Popular Front, accurately guessed the number of seats the Popular Front would receive in the Chamber. By betting against his own side he won $100,000.

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