Symptoms of Malaise

If the issues were not so serious, Italy's parliamentary election campaign this spring might rank as one of the year's more memorable real-life dramas of the absurd.

An alltime record of 82 parties have nominated candidates for the May elections, which President Giovanni Leone has called a year ahead of schedule after Giulio Andreotti's failure to form yet another center-left coalition government (TIME. Feb. 21). The parties range from far left to far right (one is even called the National Reactionary Movement), but some are a bit difficult to categorize ideologically. In addition to the Association of Free Merchants and the Autonomous Party of Pensioners, for instance, there is the all-nudist Naturalist Movement, whose candidate this year is Model Anna Maria Martini, 25. Proponents of acid rock, free sex, abortion and legalized marijuana can line up behind the Ippi (hippie) Party's candidate, Angelo Quattrocchi, 27.

Among the best-known candidates will be Film Actor Gian Maria Volonte, star of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Concetto Lo Bello. Italy's most famous soccer referee. For militant leftists, there is Anarchist Pietro Valpreda, 39, a professional dancer by trade, who is charged with having killed 16 people and wounded 90 by planting a bomb two years ago in Milan's Agricultural Bank. Militant rightists can turn to Pino Rauti, 46, a neo-Fascist newsman who is accused of exploding 24 bombs at various places in 1969, including eight aboard trains on the Milan-Venice run. If elected, both Valpreda and Rauti would gain parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

The fragmentation of parties is to some extent a reflection of Italian individualism. It is also a symptom of the country's deep political malaise. The center-left coalition, dominated by the Christian Democrats, which has governed Italy for a decade, is hopelessly divided by ideological quarrels and personal vendettas. Popular disgust with the coalition's method of governing by revolving-door cabinets--four in the past two years alone--could lead to modest gains for the Communists and their far-left allies.

At the same time a growing number of chaos-weary Italians are also impressed with the law-and-order platform of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, which has only 30 seats in the outgoing 630-member Chamber of Deputies, but managed to double its previous popular vote in last year's local elections. One of the neoFascists' major campaign issues this spring is a demand for a new constitution establishing a strong presidential system. Italians worried about the growing appeal of neo-Fascism take it as a bad omen that the country has not had a premature election since 1924--the year Benito Mussolini's Fascists swept to power.

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