Togliatti's Round

For four months the chief preoccupation of Italian politicians of every stripe has been the merger negotiations between Vice Premier Giuseppe Saragat's Social Democratic Party and Pietro Nenni's Red-lining Socialists. By last week most of Rome's pundits agreed that unification was a foregone conclusion. All that remained was for Nenni to meet Saragat's prime condition for unification: denunciation of the "unity of action" pact that has bound Nenni's Socialists to Italy's Communist Party since 1946.

The pundits were reckoning without the Byzantine deviousness of Lenin (formerly Stalin) Prizewinner Pietro Nenni. One evening last week Nenni and Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti held a ceremonious meeting in a caucus room of the Chamber of Deputies. When they emerged after 90 minutes of dickering, the "unity of action" pact was a thing of the past, but Socialist-Communist collaboration was not. Instead Nenni and Togliatti had worked out a "new form" of relationship --another written agreement calling for "close consultation between the Socialist and Communist Parties both at the summit and at the base."

Exactly what the new agreement implied no one (except Nenni and Togliatti) really knew, but its clear effect was to postpone the unification of Italian Socialism and the emergence of a strong, democratic left wing in Italy. Said angry Giuseppe Saragat: "The new pact reveals that those Socialist Party members who want autonomy have surrendered to Communist forces now within their party apparatus. It can mean the end of a great hope." Said Turin's La Stampa: "Another round for Togliatti."

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