The Antifascist Republic and Its Parties

Abstract

Italian liberals of the prefascist era did not like political parties. For years it was thought that they did not understand them, but then it was realized that they understood them only too well and that it was precisely because they understood them that they rejected them (Pombeni 2010). The conclusions at the end of Chapter 1 suggest that the liberals did not like parties because they had become the focus of political divisions, strengthening the antisystem forces and challenging attempts by the modernizing elite to protect the institutions, the laws, and the truth from political dissent. The corrective and pedagogical project that the liberals had been pursuing since the Risorgimento, in sum, was not compatible with a politicized society. In the long term, however, liberal attempts to sterilize political divisions were unable to resist the pressures of modernity and democracy. After the First World War the liberals lost their dominant position, and the Catholic, socialist, communist, and fascist parties arrived in force on the electoral and parliamentary scene. One of the main causes of the collapse of the prefascist system was the coexistence of liberal constitutional conventions, which could work only in the absence of organized mass parties, with the “party” laws that Luigi Sturzo and his Catholic People’s Party wanted to impose on Italy (Orsina 1996 and 2008).