Off & Running

For Italy's 243 elected Senators and 596 Deputies, all roads led out of Rome last week. Getting the jump on the presidential decree formally dissolving Parliament, the politicians scurried home to start campaigning in the first general election in five years.

If the April 28-29 election were only a personal popularity contest, short (5 ft. 1 in.), mustachioed Premier Amintore Fanfani, 55, might find himself out of a job. Fanfani is shrewd, not simpatico; behind his back, critics call him and his aides i bassotti (the dachshunds). More than Fanfani's looks and cold political style are against him. A 6% jump in living costs last year touched off a prolonged wave of strikes by industrial and whitecollar workers; fortnight ago, 5,000,000 workers quit their jobs in a one-day general walkout. Fanfani's year-old partnership with Pietro Nenni's left-wing Socialists, the apertura a sinistra (opening to the left), has sharply divided the Premier's own Christian Democratic Party; the coalition's major legislative accomplishment--the needless and expensive nationalization of the electrical industry, which was Nenni's price for collaboration --has turned many businessmen against the government.

Still, Fanfani figures to stay on top. Of the six nations in the Common Market, Italy's estimated 6% growth rate this year is the highest; at about 1,000,000, unemployment is half the 1956 level. Many Italians fear that flirtation with that old Stalin Prizewinner Pietro Nenni will eventually lead Italy down the path to neutralism. But so far, Nenni has pulled to the right in international affairs, away from his longtime Communist allies. He has even halfheartedly endorsed a NATO nuclear force. Nenni was probably saved a little Socialistic embarrassment when the U.S. recently agreed to pull its Jupiter missiles out of Italy.

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