Italy

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25309, 8 October 1947, Page 6

Italy

The municipal elections which are due to be held in Rome this month may have more than ordinary significance, not only for Italy herself but for the future of United States policy towards her. For it is clear that the Communists, excluded from the Italian Cabinet on American assurances of aid to Mr de Gasperi, have made every effort in the last few months, through their power in the labour movement, to prepare the way for ending the present Government. The Rome elections may measure their progress; though it is necessary to remember that such progress as they may show will, of course, have been made before American aid, under the emergency programme and in the frame of whatever may emerge from the Marshall plan, has begun to flow. But since general elections are set down for the spring, there is more than one good reason why the State Department should be “ dis- “ mayed ”, as a recent cable message reported it to be, at the prospect of serious delay in the American aid programme. It fears that Congress will not approve the emergency aid proposals before the middle of January, which will be “two months after France, Italy, “ and Austria have reached complete “ dollar bankruptcy ” and that a final decision on the Marshall plan “will be deferred long after March 31

If, then, the Italian opposition parties find the slow movement of American policy propitious for forcing a political division, they feel that they can hardly fail to be unaided by the record of Mr de Gasperi’s Christian Democrat Government. And in that many foreign observers support them. Depending on the support of Mr Giannini’s equivocal Common Man Party, itself not very securely united, the Government, its critics say, has failed to carry through its promises of fundamental social and economic reforms in an effort to simplify the Italians’ living problems. It has failed to stop inflation and to get the farmers to surrender their produce at the authorised prices. The critics point to Italy’s unemployed, still numbering nearly 2,000,000, and to the drop in industrial production,

through shortages of raw materials, coal and power, to a volume placed at 60 to 65 per cent, of the pre-war level, with the threat of even greater reductions to come. The Communists and Socialists have shown in the wave of political strikes which threatened recently to bring the Italian economy to a standstill, that they intend, and know how, to use any popular discontent in their offensive against the Christian Democrats. And the question for the Americans is, therefore, not only whether they can aid the Italians quickly but whether their help, when it is given, will be all that is required to maintain the kind of government they wish to see in power. They may have to show the Italians, for one thing, that the Marshall plan will not be less effective because the countries of Eastern Europe, which were important in Italy’s trade before the war, have refused to co-operate.•