| Italian Liberal Party Partito Liberale Italiano |
|
|---|---|
| Former leaders | Benedetto Croce, Bruno Villabruna, Gaetano Martino, Giovanni Malagodi, Agostino Bignardi, Valerio Zanone, Alfredo Biondi, Renato Altissimo, Raffaele Costa |
| Founded | 8 October 1922 |
| Dissolved | 6 February 1994 |
| Newspaper | L'Opinione |
| Membership (1958) | 173,722 (max)[1] |
| Ideology | Liberalism, conservatism, conservative liberalism |
| International affiliation | Liberal International |
| European affiliation | European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party |
| European Parliament Group | ELDR group |
| Politics of Italy Political parties Elections |
|
The Italian Liberal Party (Italian: Partito Liberale Italiano, PLI) was a liberal political party in Italy.
Contents |
The origins of liberalism in Italy came from the so-called "Historical Right", a parliamentary group formed by Camillo Benso di Cavour in the Parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia following the 1848 revolution. The Liberals were moderately conservative and supported centralised government, restricted suffrage, regressive taxation, and free trade. They dominated Italian politics following unification in 1861 but never formed a party, basing their power on census suffrage and the first-past-the-post electoral system.
The Right was opposed by a more progressive faction, the "Historical Left", which overthrew Marco Minghetti's government during the so-called "Parliamentary Revolution" of 1876, which allowed the premiership of Agostino Depretis. However, Depretis immediately began to search the support of the Right MPs, which easily accepted to change their positions, in a situation of large corruption. This phenomenon (on a satirical newspaper, the Premier was depicted as a chameleon), called in Italian as trasformismo (roughly translated in English as "transformism"), cancelled the political differences in the Parliament, which was dominated by an undistinguished liberal bloc with a landslide majority until after World War I.[2]
During the 1900s and 1910s, two parliamentary factions alternated in government, one led by Sidney Sonnino, and the other one, by far the larger of the two, led by Giovanni Giolitti. At that time the Liberals governed in alliance with the Radicals, the Democrats and eventually with the Reform Socialists.
At the end of the war universal suffrage and proportional representation were introduced in Italy. This reforms caused big problems to the Liberals, which found themselves unable to stop the rise of the two big, structured, and democratic parties, the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian People's Party, which had taken the control of many local authorities in Northern Italy even before the war. But the Italian particularity was the fact that even if the Catholic party was in opposition to the Socialists in accordance with European standards, it was also in contrast with the Liberals and, generally, the Right, under the consequences of the long echo of the capture of Rome and the struggles between the Holy See and the Italian state which the Liberals had ruled for more than fifty years.
The Parliament was so divided in three different blocks with a huge instability, while the Socialists by one part, and the rising Fascists by the other one, became protagonists of political violences. In this chaotic situation, the Liberals founded their Italian Liberal Party in 1922, which immediately was taken into the Fascist net. The party presented itself into the list of the National Fascist Party during the 1924 general election, giving to Fascists the support to turn a small political force into an absolute-majority party. The party was finally banned under Benito Mussolini in 1925, while many ancient liberal politicians were given rich, but uninfluent, political posts, as seats in the Italian Senate.
The party was re-founded in 1943 by Benedetto Croce, a prominent intellectual and senator whose international recognition allowed him to remain a free man during the Fascist regime, despite being an anti-fascist himself. Various groups had claimed the label "Liberal" before, but had never organised themselves as a party. After the end of World War II, Liberal Enrico De Nicola became "Provisional Head of State" (later President of the Republic from January 1, 1948) and another one, Luigi Einaudi (who, as Minister of Economy and Governor of the Bank of Italy between 1945 and 1948, had reshaped Italian economy), second President of Italy.
In the 1946 general election the party, which was part of the National Democratic Union, won 6.8% of the vote, which was somewhat below expectations. Indeed PLI was supported by all the survivors of the Italian political class before the rise of Fascism, from Vittorio Emanuele Orlando to Francesco Saverio Nitti. In the first years, the party was led by Leone Cattani, member of the internal left, and then by Roberto Lucifero, a monarchist-conservative. This fact caused the exit of the group of Cattani, so that Bruno Villabruna, a moderate, was elected secretary in 1948 in order to re-unite all the Liberals under a single banner.
Under Giovanni Malagodi, the party moved further to the right on economic issues. In particular, the PLI opposed the new centre-left coalition that included also the Italian Socialist Party and presented itself as the main conservative party in Italy. This caused in 1956 the exit of the party's left-wing, including Bruno Villabruna, Eugenio Scalfari and Marco Pannella, who founded the Radical Party.
Malagodi managed to draw some votes from the Italian Social Movement, the Monarchist National Party and especially Christian Democracy, whose party base was composed also by conservatives who were suspicious of the Socialists, increasing the party's share to a historical record of 7.0% in the 1963 general election. After his resignation from party leadership in 1972, the Liberals were defeated with a humiliating 1.3% in 1976 and tried to re-gain strength by supporting social reforms such as divorce.
After Valerio Zanone took over in 1976, the party moved to the centre. The new secretary opened to the Socialists, hoping to put in action a sort of Lib-Lab cooperation, similar to that experimented in the United Kingdom from 1977 to 1979 between Labour and the Liberals.
In 1983 the PLI finally joined the pentapartito coalition composed also of the Christian Democracy (DC), the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI) and the Italian Republican Party (PRI). The coalition was dubbed for a long time pentapartito. In the 1980s, the party was led by Renato Altissimo and Alfredo Biondi.
With the uncovering of the corruption system nicknamed Tangentopoli by the Mani Pulite investigation, many government parties experienced a rapid loss of their support. In the first months the Liberal Party seemed immune to investigation. However, as the investigations further unraveled, the PLI turned out to be part of the corruption scheme. Francesco De Lorenzo, the Liberal Minister of Health, was one of the most loathed politicians in Italy for his corruption, that involved stealing funds from the sick, and allowing commercialisation of medicines based on bribes.
The party was disbanded in February 1994 and there were at least six heirs:
After some years from the party dissolution, most members have migrated to Forza Italia or other parties of the centre-right, while some other joined the centre-left, and especially Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy.
In 2004 the party was re-founded by Stefano De Luca, then leader of the Liberal Party, Renato Altissimo, Carla Martino (sister of Antonio), Giuseppe Basini, Attilio Bastianini, Savino Melillo, Salvatore Grillo, Arturo Diaconale and Gian Nicola Amoretti. This new party gathers some of the Italian right-wing liberals, but soon distanced itself from the centre-right coalition dominated by Forza Italia, where most Italian Liberals ended up, in order to follow an autonomous path.
As of 2011, the modern-day PLI is affiliated to the New Pole for Italy coalition.
Before the World Wars the Liberals were the political establishment that governed Italy for decades. Their political base of support was in Piedmont, where many leading liberal politicians of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of Italy (including both Camillo Cavour and Giovanni Giolitti) hailed from, and Southern Italy. The Liberals never gained large support after World War II as they were not able to become a mass party and were replaced by Christian Democracy as the dominant political force of the country. In the 1946 general election, the first after the war, the Liberal Party gained 6.8% as part of the National Democratic Union. At that time they were strong especially in the South, as Christian Democracy was mainly rooted in the North: 21.0% in Campania, 22.8% in Basilicata, 10.4% in Apulia, 12.8% in Calabria and 13.6% in Sicily.[3]
The party's main constituency were the industrial elites of the North-West, the so-called "industrial triangle" formed by Turin, Milan and Genoa. The Liberals had their best results in the 1960s, when they were rewarded by liberal-conservative voters for their opposition to the participation of the Italian Socialist Party to the government. The party won 7.0% of the vote in 1963 (15.2% in Turin, 18.7% in Milan and 11.5% in Genoa) and 5.8% 1963. Liberals suffered a decline in the 1970s and settled around 2–3% in the 1980s, when their strongholds were reduced to Piedmont, and especially the provinces of Torino and Cuneo, and, to a minor extent, Western Lombardy, Liguria and Sicily.[4]
As the other parties of the Pentapartito coalition (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Republicans and Democratic Socialists), Liberals strengthened their grip on the South, while in the North they all would have lost many votes to Lega Nord and its regional precursors. In the 1992 general election, the last before the Tangentopoli scandals, the PLI won 2.9% of the vote, a decent result thanks to the increase of votes from the South, which can be considered the Indian summer of the party before the 1992–1994 storm.[4]
After the end of the "First Republic" former Liberals were very influent within Forza Italia (FI) in Piedmont, Liguria and, strangely enough, in Veneto, where Giancarlo Galan was three times elected President. Former Liberals are still dominant within the ranks of The People of Freedom (the successor of FI) in the province of Cuneo and in Liguria.
|
|||||||||||