Not Well Enough

The West read the results of Italy's spring municipal elections with vague uneasiness. Although the Communists had lost most of the towns & cities they had dominated, they had made disturbing gains in popular vote: Red ballots were up to 37.2%, v. 30.3% in 1948; in the same period, the Demo-Christian vote had dropped from 47.3% to 35.5%.

Yet the Communists lost 1,042 of the 1,959 communities which they had controlled, among them some of Italy's most important cities--Florence, Turin, Pisa, Genoa, Venice. Still in Communist hands: Bologna, Siena, Modena, Parma. Chiefly responsible for their defeat in the cities: Italy's new electoral law which automatically gives the majority party in a community two-thirds of the seats on the town council, instead of parceling them out proportionally as before (TIME, June 11).

The Communists achieved their gain after years of Marshall Plan aid to Italy, at a time when the country was probably in better economic shape than at any time in modern history, and despite the Roman Catholic Church's strong intervention for the Demo-Christian De Gasperi. Italian politicians had some explanations:

P: Like a U.S. off-year election, the municipal elections seemed less important to Italians than a national vote. On many specific local issues, Italians felt safe in voting for the Communists--paradoxically, because they believe that Communism's threat to Italy has diminished.

P: The Church's direct appeal from the pulpits for Demo-Christian votes may have hindered as well as helped, for while 99.6% of all Italians are Catholics, many cling to a stubborn anticlerical tradition in politics.

Whatever the politicians' explanations, this fact remained: the West has done well in Italy during the past three years, but not well enough to chalk up an unqualified victory on its record.

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