Precarious Balancing Act

Once, years ago, when he still indulged in his favorite sport of mountain climbing, Alcide de Gasperi careered downward when his rope jammed. "I found myself dangling over the void," he said later. "For 20 minutes I could not move. People in the valley could see me just hanging there. Then I swung over to a ridge and I was safe." Italy's 71-year-old Prime Minister no longer climbs mountains, but his talent for hanging on has become one of the most awesome political feats of the postwar era.

He has survived six overturns of his government, each time patiently rebuilding a coalition. He has given Italy seven years of continuous government, making him the longest-lived Premier in Western Europe. He has held together a sprawling aggregation of land-starved peasants and big landowners, Catholic trade unionists and stand-pat industrialists--clustered under the Lombard Cross of his Christian Democratic Party. He has staved off the largest Red party this side of the Iron Curtain.

The Librarian. Anti-Fascist Alcide de Gasperi was a regular inmate of Mussolini's prisons until, his health broken, he was let out in 1929. He spent the next 14 years in the quiet of the Vatican Library--as a clerk, filing index cards. He stretched his $80-a-month salary, on which he supported a wife and four daughters, by translating from the German at a nickel a page. Meanwhile, he kept in touch with his fellow Christian Democrats, and when Mussolini fell, a skeleton Christian party was ready. By April 1945 De Gasperi was Italy's Foreign Minister; by year's end he was named Premier. The first thing De Gasperi did was to get a salary advance so he could buy a good blue suit.

Today, he no longer lives in the $9-a-month, five-flights-up Rome apartment he rented even after becoming Premier. His grateful party last year gave him an eight-room villa and his salary has gone up to $500 a month. A kind of Latin Attlee, De Gasperi is the complete antithesis of his predecessor, Mussolini. Like Adenauer in Germany and Schuman and Bidault in France--Roman Catholics all--De Gasperi belongs to that underrecognized group of Christian Democrats who have done most to save postwar Western Europe. At a time when the left was divided in Marxist confusion, and the right was discredited by its past, the Christian Democrats were both social-minded and sustained by their faith.

The Dangers. Last week, however, there were signs that Italy's greatest political balancing act of modern times has nearly run its course. The very compromises that have won De Gasperi power may topple him from it. Governing a sprawling coalition that runs from Socialists to monarchists, De Gasperi has been unable to get agreement for a concerted attack on Italy's great and growing economic problems. Italy has 2,000,000 unemployed, another 1,500,000 working part-time. Millions of Italians still live in caves and huts, or jammed four and five into a room. Land reform, Italy's greatest need, has been imperceptible, in spite of De Gasperi's promises. De Gasperi's own party is split between the "Wasps," right-wingers who petition him to ease up on reform, and the Young Turks who repeatedly threaten to resign if reform isn't speeded up.

The Challenge. One fine lazy spring morning last week, as De Gasperi strolled through the woods with his dog, his secretary brought disturbing news. Negotiations for a solid anti-Communist alliance in next month's municipal elections in southern Italy were collapsing. The monarchists, probably the third largest party in the south, were demanding as their price for joining the Demochristian alliance that the neo-Fascist M.S.I. party also be admitted. Unless De Gasperi yielded, Rome, Naples and Bari might well elect Communist mayors and councils. A Red Rome next month might mean a Red Italy next year, at the general elections. Yet De Gasperi, for all his willingness to compromise, would not compromise with Fascists. After lunch, he sat down and wrote a polemic that appeared next morning on the front page of the Christian Democratic Il Popolo under the signature "Quidam de Populo" ("One of the People"). Said De Gasperi: he would have no truck with the neo-Fascist party, which attacks basic principles of democracy, and "glorifies the regime that has gone."

Then, having done his duty, he went back to writing a speech for the 500th birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, on which he had already spent three weeks studying 20 volumes of material. Premier de Gasperi wanted his thoughts on Da Vinci to be expressed just right.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.