Italian Socialist Party

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian Socialist Party, known in Italian as the Partito Socialista Italiano, was founded on the 14th of August 1892 in the port city of Genoa. It would go on to shape Italian politics for over a century, pulling the country toward the left, fracturing under the rise of fascism, and surviving underground and in exile before returning to power in the postwar republic. Then, in 1994, it collapsed almost overnight, destroyed not by its enemies but by the weight of its own corruption.

  How did a party that once won nearly a third of Italy's votes end up receiving just 2.2% a few decades later? What kind of movement contained both the man who would become Italy's first Socialist prime minister and the man who would become its most notorious fascist dictator? And what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Italians who called themselves Socialists after the party was gone?

  The answers run through the smoky factories of Turin, the rural fields of Emilia-Romagna, the halls of parliament, and eventually a hotel corridor in Milan where, in February 1992, a hospital administrator named Mario Chiesa was caught with a bribe in his hand.

• 2. A Party Born in Dispute

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  Delegates from several workers' associations gathered in Genoa in 1892 under the banner of the Party of Italian Workers. The founding moment was less a triumphant birth than a negotiation. The group's tent was wide from the start, stretching from the revolutionary socialism of Andrea Costa to the anarchist feminism of Anna Kuliscioff and the parliamentary reformism of Filippo Turati.

  By its second congress, held on the 8th of September 1893 in Reggio Emilia, the party had already changed its name to the Socialist Party of Italian Workers. By the third congress on the 13th of January 1895 in Parma, it settled on the name that would stick: the Italian Socialist Party. Turati was elected its first secretary at that same gathering.

  The early party modelled itself on the Social Democratic Party of Germany and had to endure government persecution in its first years. It was entering a political landscape where, in Sicily, the Fasci Siciliani were already spreading as a popular democratic and socialist movement among agricultural workers. By the early 1900s, the PSI chose a path of cautious cooperation with the five-time prime minister Giovanni Giolitti rather than outright confrontation. That conciliation helped it grow into a mainstream force.

  The party's internal divisions, however, were structural. Two major tendencies competed: the Reformists, led by Turati, who were strong in the unions and in parliament; and the Maximalists, led by Costantino Lazzari, who were affiliated with the London Bureau of left-wing socialist internationals. In 1912, the Maximalists prevailed at the party convention under the direction of a young agitator named Benito Mussolini, which triggered the split of the Italian Reformist Socialist Party. Mussolini then became leader of the City Council of Milan in 1914, heading the party's pro-Bolshevik wing between 1912 and 1914.

• 3. Fascism and the Fracture

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  World War I shattered the party's fragile unity. A faction of national syndicalists inside the PSI broke away over the question of whether Italy should enter the war, arguing that fighting the Austrian Empire would advance revolutionary goals. The dominant internationalist wing held firm, calling the conflict a bourgeois war and refusing to support it.

  Mussolini, by then sympathetic to the national syndicalist cause, was expelled from the party. He and a number of fellow expellees went on to join what became the Fasces of Revolutionary Action in 1915 and, eventually, Mussolini turned the Fasces of Combat into the National Fascist Party at the Third Fascist Congress in late 1921.

  With Mussolini gone, the PSI experienced its greatest electoral moment. Led by Nicola Bombacci, the party won 32.0% of the vote and 156 seats in the 1919 Italian general election, its highest result ever. Socialists had become Italy's first party. Between 1919 and the early 1920s, Socialists and Fascists clashed violently in Italy's urban centres. In 1919, the Socialist Party of Turin even formed the Red Army of Turin and proposed a national confederation of Red Scouts and Cyclists.

  At the 1921 Livorno Congress, the party's left wing broke away to form the Communist Party of Italy. That division, from which the PSI never fully recovered, had enormous consequences on Italian politics for decades to come. A further split in 1922 expelled the reformist wing led by Turati and Giacomo Matteotti, who founded the Unitary Socialist Party.

  Matteotti was assassinated by Fascists in 1924. By 1926, the PSI and all other non-Fascist parties were banned. The party's leadership survived in exile or underground through the entire Fascist period. The exiled Unitary Socialist Party was re-integrated into the PSI in 1930, and the party held membership in the Labour and Socialist International between 1930 and 1940.

• 4. The Postwar Left

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  In the first general election after World War II, held in 1946, the PSI won 20.7% of the vote, narrowly ahead of the Italian Communist Party, which took 18.9%. The two parties formed an alliance and governed together at the local level, particularly in the cities and the regions that became known as the red belt.

  The United States secretly convinced Britain's Labour Party to pressure Italian Socialists to end their coalition with the Communists before the 1948 election. The pressure contributed to a split: Pietro Nenni led the Socialists into the Popular Democratic Front alongside the PCI, while Giuseppe Saragat launched the rival Italian Workers' Socialist Party. The PSI's parliamentary delegation was cut by roughly half as a result.

  The PSI maintained its alliance with the PCI until 1956, when Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution caused a major rupture between the two parties. Starting in 1963, the Socialists entered the Organic centre-left governments alongside Christian Democracy, the Italian Democratic Socialist Party, and the Italian Republican Party. Those governments laid the foundations for Italy's modern welfare state.

  In 1964, the party's internal left wing departed in protest at both the plan to govern with Christian Democrats and a plan to reunify with Saragat's Social Democrats. The splinter group founded the PSIUP under figures including Tullio Vecchietti, Vittorio Foa, Lelio Basso, Emilio Lussu, and Lucio Libertini. Later, an attempt to merge with the Social Democrats under the unified name PSU collapsed after the 1968 election, in which the combined party won far fewer seats than each partner had gained separately in 1963.

  By the 1976 Italian general election, the Communist Party had reached 34.4% of the vote while the PSI had fallen to 9.6%. In the Socialist heartlands of rural Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, Communists now held almost five times the vote of the party that had dominated there only a generation before.

• 5. The Craxi Years

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  Bettino Craxi was elected party secretary in 1976 and immediately set about trying to end the Communists' steady advance. His strategy involved repositioning the PSI as a modern, strongly pro-European reformist party, cutting ties to its working-class trade union base and reaching for white-collar and public sector voters instead.

  By 1983, the electoral support for Christian Democracy had weakened significantly, falling from 38.3% in 1979 to 32.9%. The PSI, holding only 11% of the vote, threatened to leave the parliamentary majority unless Craxi was made prime minister. Christian Democrats accepted the compromise, and Craxi became the first Socialist in the history of the Italian Republic to be appointed prime minister.

  His government lasted three and a half years, from 1983 to 1987. Longer than many of its predecessors, the administration boosted the country's GNP and brought inflation under control. Craxi also demonstrated Italy's independence in the Sigonella incident, a direct confrontation with the United States. He spoke of transforming Italy's constitution toward a presidential system and positioned the PSI as the driving force of the Pentapartito coalition.

  Under Craxi, the party dropped the hammer and sickle from its symbol and replaced it with a carnation, the symbol associated with democratic socialism and social democracy across Europe. The party rebranded as liberal socialist. Observers at the time compared the shift to Third Way developments in social democracy and described it as running roughly twenty years ahead of New Labour in the United Kingdom. The PSI aligned itself with like-minded leaders across Europe: François Mitterrand in France, Felipe González in Spain, Andreas Papandreou in Greece, and Mário Soares in Portugal. It became one of the main representatives of what was described as Mediterranean or South European socialism.

  In the 1987 election, the PSI won 14.3% of the vote. From 1987 to 1992, the party participated in four governments, holding a balance of power that made it more influential than its vote share alone would suggest. By 1989, Craxi was proposing Socialist Unity with the other left-wing parties, including the PCI, arguing that the fall of communism in eastern Europe had made such a realignment inevitable. The PSI was, by some reckonings, in line to become Italy's second largest party.

• 6. Tangentopoli and Collapse

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  On a February day in 1992, Mario Chiesa, a Socialist hospital administrator in Milan, was caught taking a bribe. Craxi denounced him as an isolated thief with no connection to the party. Feeling betrayed, Chiesa confessed to the police and implicated others, setting off a chain reaction that would engulf the entire Italian political system.

  The investigations, named mani pulite, or "clean hands", were carried out by a team of Milanese magistrates. Among them, Antonio Di Pietro stood out quickly for his charismatic ability to extract confessions and became a national hero. The investigations were paused for four weeks so the 1992 Italian general election could take place in an uninfluenced atmosphere; the PSI managed 13.6% of the vote despite the scandal.

  Many in the party assumed the damage had been contained. Instead, by May 1992, public opinion had turned decisively in favour of the magistrates against a political system that most Italians already distrusted. Craxi himself came under criminal investigation in December 1992. In April 1993, the Italian Parliament denied magistrates permission to continue their investigation of Craxi four separate times. Italian newspapers shouted scandal. A crowd of young people besieged Craxi at his Rome residence and threw coins at him, shouting "Bettino, do you want these as well?"

  Between January and February 1993, former justice minister and deputy prime minister Claudio Martelli attempted to take control of the party, positioning himself as a reformer willing to clean out the corruption. His candidacy collapsed when it emerged that in 1982 the Banco Ambrosiano had transferred around seven million dollars to both Martelli and Craxi. Martelli resigned from the party and from the government. Giuliano Amato, himself a PSI member, resigned as prime minister in April 1993. His government was succeeded by a technocratic administration led by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

• 7. Disbanding and Diaspora

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  Craxi resigned as party secretary in February 1993. Between 1992 and 1993, most of the party's members left politics, and three PSI deputies committed suicide. Craxi was succeeded first by Giorgio Benvenuto and then by Ottaviano Del Turco, both Socialist trade-unionists.

  In the December 1993 provincial and municipal elections, the party received around 3% of the vote nationwide. In Milan, where the PSI had won 20% in 1990, it received a mere 2% and was shut out of the council. By the 1994 Italian general election, the party was contesting as part of the Alliance of Progressives, dominated by the post-Communist Democratic Party of the Left. It won only 2.2% of the vote, down from 13.6% in 1992, electing 16 deputies and 14 senators, compared to 92 deputies and 49 senators two years earlier.

  The party disbanded on the 13th of November 1994. The century-old institution closed down, its leaders having spent the final years personalising and ultimately consuming it.

  What followed was a diaspora rather than a succession. Former Socialists split in sharply different directions. Many joined Forza Italia, the new centre-right party led by Silvio Berlusconi. Among those who crossed to the right were Giulio Tremonti, Franco Frattini, Fabrizio Cicchitto, Renato Brunetta, and Stefania Craxi. Others, like Valdo Spini, Giorgio Benvenuto, Gianni Pittella, and Guglielmo Epifani, joined the centre-left Democrats of the Left. Giuliano Amato joined The Olive Tree as an independent.

  In 2007, a group including the Italian Democratic Socialists, a portion of the New Italian Socialist Party, the Italian Socialists of Bobo Craxi, and Socialism is Freedom under Rino Formica joined forces to form a new Socialist Party. That party renamed itself the Italian Socialist Party in 2011, becoming the only Italian party represented in Parliament to explicitly call itself Socialist.