Christian Democracy (Italy)

• 1. Introduction

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  Christian Democracy, Democrazia Cristiana, held Italy's government for nearly half a century. Founded on the 15th of December 1943 in Nazi-occupied Italian territory, it became the dominant force in Italian politics from 1946 until it collapsed in scandal in January 1994. The questions the party raises are not just about Italy. They are about what happens when one party governs a democracy so completely and for so long that the alternative is almost unthinkable. How did a party born in wartime rubble win 48.5% of the vote just five years later? And how does a party that governed continuously for fifty years disappear in the space of two years? The answers involve a kidnapped politician, a bribery network that reached the highest offices in Italy, and a nickname that said everything: the White Whale.

• 2. Born From Ruins

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  Luigi Sturzo, a Catholic priest, created the original Italian People's Party in 1919, and the DC was conceived as that party's revival. The PPI had won more than 20% of the vote in both the 1919 and 1921 general elections, only to be declared illegal by the Fascist dictatorship in 1926. Some members had even served in Benito Mussolini's first government, which made the party's eventual suppression a painful irony.

  As World War II came to an end, the Christian Democrats organised alongside every other mainstream political party, including the Italian Communist Party, the Italian Socialist Party, and the Action Party. The ideological range of those early coalition partners was vast; what united them was the need to rebuild. In December 1945 Alcide De Gasperi, a Christian Democrat, was appointed Prime Minister. The party's founding symbol was a crusader shield, the scudo crociato, the same emblem the PPI had used, a deliberate act of continuity across the Fascist interruption.

  In the 1946 general election, voters gave the DC 35.2% of the vote, making it the largest party in parliament from that moment forward. It would hold that position without interruption through every election until the party's dissolution in 1994.

• 3. De Gasperi's Republic

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  In May 1947, De Gasperi broke decisively with his Communist and Socialist coalition partners under pressure from U.S. President Harry Truman. The rupture realigned Italian politics permanently. A centrist coalition formed in its place, incorporating the Italian Workers' Socialist Party, a breakaway from the PSI, along with the Italian Liberal Party and the Italian Republican Party.

  The 1948 general election produced the DC's peak result: 48.5% of the vote and an absolute majority in parliament, achieved with the active support of the Catholic Church and the United States. De Gasperi governed with his centrist coalition anyway, choosing not to rule alone. The Liberals abandoned the coalition in 1950, wanting more right-wing policy; the Democratic Socialists left in 1951, wanting the opposite. The party held the middle by satisfying no single faction completely.

  De Gasperi used his tenure to carry out major land reforms in the poorer rural regions. Farms were taken from large landowners and distributed to peasants. Laws protecting workers from exploitation were passed, a national health service was established, and low-cost housing went up in Italy's major cities. De Gasperi served as prime minister until 1953 and died a year later. His successors would find that his electoral share, 38-43% across every election from 1953 to 1979, masked growing internal fracture. Prime Ministers changed with increasing frequency as the decades wore on.

• 4. The Aldo Moro Years

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  From 1954, progressive Christian Democrats took leadership of the party: Amintore Fanfani, Aldo Moro, and Benigno Zaccagnini, each backed by influential left-wing internal factions. In 1963, under Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the DC formed a coalition with the Italian Socialist Party, which had been excluded from ministerial roles for 16 years. Coalitions of this centre-left character, known as Organic Centre-left governments, became the norm through the 1960s and the 1970s.

  From 1976 to 1979, the DC went a step further, governing with the external support of the Italian Communist Party itself, through a delicate arrangement known as the Historic Compromise. Moro, who was the architect of this arrangement and the party's dominant figure, was abducted by the Red Brigades in 1978. The government, then led by Giulio Andreotti, declared that the state must not bend to terrorist demands.

  During his captivity Moro wrote letters, some of them sharply critical of Andreotti. The contrast with other kidnapping cases was stark: in the abduction of Ciro Cirillo, a DC member from Campania, a ransom was paid through the party's local ties with the Camorra. At Andreotti's later trial on Mafia allegations, prosecutors argued that he had used Moro's abduction as an opportunity to remove a dangerous political rival. Moro was killed. The memorial he wrote during imprisonment became the subject of further violence afterward, including the assassination of journalist Mino Pecorelli and general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

• 5. The White Whale and Its Factions

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  The party's nickname, the White Whale, referred to its enormous organisation and its official colour. It was an apt image: vast, hard to steer, and nearly impossible to bring down by any conventional means.

  The DC's ideological range was by design. It drew on Catholic social teaching developed across the 19th century, the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum from 1891 and Quadragesimo anno from 1931, and the political thought of Romolo Murri and Luigi Sturzo. In economics the party supported the social market model, rejected Marxist class struggle, and positioned itself as a catch-all party representing all Italian Catholics against socialism, communism, and anarchism.

  This catch-all nature produced factionalism on a structural scale. From the early years, centrists such as De Gasperi coexisted with progressives such as Fanfani and right-wingers such as Antonio Segni. The party's left wing, rooted in figures like Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira, was reinforced over time by new leaders. Moro, Mariano Rumor, and Andreotti were classified as centrist figures unaffiliated to any faction, and the DC often ran a custom by which the government and the party secretariat were held by leaders from opposite wings. When Fanfani led the party in the 1950s, the government was led by centre-right figures. When Benigno Zaccagnini led the party in the late 1970s, Andreotti led the government. The arrangement, antithetical to the Westminster model, converted broad parliamentary majorities into chronic governmental paralysis. Observers called the result a particracy, partitocrazia, where party machinery rather than elected mandates drove decisions.

• 6. Geography of Power

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  In the 1948 general election the DC won 66.8% in eastern Lombardy, with the Province of Bergamo reaching 73.6%. Veneto gave the party 60.5%, the Province of Vicenza 71.9%. Trentino delivered 69.6% and Friuli-Venezia Giulia 57.8%. These were the former strongholds of the original PPI, and the DC simply inherited them.

  By the 1980s the electoral geography had reversed. The DC's support had migrated south over the preceding decades. In the 1983 general election, when the party suffered a significant drop to 32.9% nationally, its best regional result came from Apulia at 46.0%. In the 1992 general election, the party crossed 40% only in Campania at 41.1%, Basilicata at 44.5%, and Sicily at 41.2%, while barely reaching 20-25% across the north.

  The reversal was driven partly by the Lega Nord, which had found its base precisely in the DC's old Catholic heartlands. In the Province of Bergamo alone, the League won 7 of 8 single-seat constituencies in the 1996 general election and exceeded 40% of the vote. The successor parties of the DC, meanwhile, remained politically relevant mainly in the south, where the clientelistic patterns the DC had cultivated over decades left a durable mark.

• 7. Tangentopoli and Collapse

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  In 1981, Giovanni Spadolini of the Italian Republican Party became the first non-Christian Democrat to lead an Italian government since 1944. The Pentapartito coalition he led included the DC alongside four other parties. In the 1983 general election the DC received 32.5%, a decline of 5.8 percentage points relative to 1981, and the PSI's Bettino Craxi claimed the prime ministership. The DC recovered the position in 1987 after a modest climb to 34.2%.

  While Italy's economy grew through the 1980s, the budget was deteriorating. Between 1982 and 1992, excessive deficit spending built a proportion of debt that would persist well into the 21st century, driven by currency devaluation and the issuance of high-interest treasury bonds.

  In 1992 the Mani pulite investigation began in Milan. It exposed Tangentopoli, a system of endemic bribery at the highest levels of Italian politics, and triggered waves of arrests and resignations. The DC's result in the 1992 general election fell to 29.7%. Lega Nord's surge in the north compounded the damage, as did Mafia investigations that reached figures including Andreotti and regional leaders such as Antonio Gava, Calogero Mannino, Vito Ciancimino, and Salvo Lima. In the 1960s, earlier scandals had involved illegal profits in banana import quota administration and the preferential allocation of misprinted postage stamps; Giovanni Leone had resigned the presidency in 1978 over the Lockheed bribery scandals. The corruption had not begun in 1992. It had been accumulating for decades.

  The party's last secretary, Mino Martinazzoli, attempted to salvage something by renaming the DC the Italian People's Party. It was not enough. The party disbanded in January 1994. In the following years most of those prosecuted were acquitted, sometimes on the basis of the statute of limitations.

• 8. What Came After

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  The DC's membership scattered across the new political landscape. Pier Ferdinando Casini led the right-wing faction into the Christian Democratic Centre and formed an alliance with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia. The united Christian Democrats, led by Rocco Buttiglione, split from the new PPI in 1995 and also joined the Berlusconi coalition. By December 1999, Forza Italia had gained full membership in the European People's Party, the same European grouping the DC had helped found in 1976.

  The left-wing faction remained within the new PPI. Under Franco Marini in 1996 the PPI allied with the Democrats of the Left and several smaller parties to form The Olive Tree coalition, which won that year's election. Romano Prodi, an independent former PPI member, led the list and became prime minister. The Olive Tree's two primary components were legal successors to the two largest political forces of pre-1990s Italy.

  The PPI eventually merged in stages with other parties. In 2002 it was absorbed into Democracy is Freedom, known as The Daisy, and in 2007 The Daisy merged with the Democrats of the Left to form the Democratic Party, today the largest centre-left party in Italy. The DC's founding member status in the European People's Party, established in 1976, is the thread that connects that vanished party most directly to the institutions that now govern Europe's political centre.