First Mortgage

In recent months wily old (66) Socialist Pietro Nenni, the he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not Stalin Peace Prizewinner, has furnished Italian politics with more suspense scenes than a Pearl White serial. Would he or would he not denounce the alliance of his Socialists with the Italian Communists? He had turned back his Stalin Prize, in feigned or real disillusionment with Moscow. Last week, as the 32nd Congress of Nenni's Italian Socialist Party moved to a close, it seemed that Nenni and his followers had at last reconciled themselves to denouncing unequivocally their Communist allies. This would meet the conditions laid down by Vice Premier Giuseppe Saragat's Social Democrats for a reunification of the long-divided Italian Social ists. While owlish Pietro Nenni beamed down from the red-streamered dais of Venice's Teatro San Marco, 1,000 Congress delegates overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for a prompt merger with the Social Democrats.

The Venice resolution brought cries of delight from Socialists all over Europe. "This is a great achievement," said French Socialist Senator Pierre Commin, the man who persuaded Nenni and Saragat to begin their merger negotiations (TIME. Sept. 10). Britain's Nye Bevan was present and beaming. "A great day for Italian Socialism," glowed Social Democratic Party Secretary Matteo Matteotti.

Bread & Butter. What all these men, including Pietro Nenni himself, apparently forgot was that 1) Red agents have had ten years of alliance in which to infiltrate Socialist ranks and 2) for most of those years Nenni left supervision of the party machinery to the late Rodolfo Morandi, an iron-fisted crypto-Communist. Besides, many influential Nenni Socialists earn their bread and butter as bureaucrats in Italy's biggest labor union, the Red-dominated CGIL.

On the last day of the Venice congress, when the delegates elected the party's new central committee by secret ballot, this hidden strength revealed itself. Of 81 central committee seats, Nenni and his followers won only 27. Unwilling to denounce the popular cause of Socialist unification in open debate, supporters of the Communist alliance had quietly sandbagged Nenni.

Figures Talk. Staggered but still fast on his feet, Nenni immediately began to drop hints that he might abandon politics and retire to his seaside villa at Formia. Coming from the Socialist Party's biggest vote getter and the idol of its rank and file, this was a potent threat. Hastily the newly elected central committee granted Nenni's demand that it endorse his Socialist unification policy and give his supporters a majority of the seats in the party secretariat.

No amount of last-minute patchwork, however, could disguise the fact that the Communists and their front men still held the first mortgage on Pietro Nenni and his party. Said angry Giuseppe Saragat: "The voting figures speak clearly: 30% of the Socialist Party tends toward social democracy; 70% tends toward or is actually anchored to pro-Communism." As for reuniting all of Italy's Socialists, said Saragat. this would now be "enormously delayed."

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