New P.M. wheeler-dealer

Press, 21 July 1976, Page 9

New P.M. wheeler-dealer

ROME By FRANCIS ROBERTS, of the Observer Foreign News Service. One of Italy’s shrewdest politicians, Mr Giulio Andreotti, aged 57, has been given the thankless task of trying to form some sort of Government. Mr Andreotti is, of course, a Christian Democrat, as has been every Prime Minister in Italy in the last 30 years. He is also — and this might seem paradoxical in the light of the dramatic’ Communist gains in the recent election — closer than any of his colleagues to the Vatican and to the Americans, the Christian Democrat Party’s traditional twin pillars of support. Now that President Leone has called him to the drab Quirinale Presidential Palace, it won’t be the first time that the round-shouldered, bespectacled Mr Andreotti finds himself called upon to pick up the pieces after a General Election.

Exactly the same thing happened in 1972, when he put together an ill-fated cen-tre-Right coalition which lasted barely 12 months.

Mr Andreotti is a consummate wheeler-dealer in the best tradition of Italian Christian Democracy. He heads his own faction within the party, and is both feared and respected by all. He is quick-witted, literary, and supremely skilful at powerbroking. As one of the few native-born Romans in Italian political life, he has the advantage of operating on his home ground, and he has

been careful to remain on excellent terms with the conservative cardinals of the Vatican Curia. He is also implicated in a number of scandals which have rocked his party in the recent past. As the man known to be closest to Washington, it was probably only to be expected that when the waves of the C.I.A. revelations crashed upon the Italian shores from the United States, Mr Andreotti’s name should figure high on the list of those said to have received money from Langley, Virginia. He appeared on British television screens last April when he was interviewed during Granada Television’s expose of bribes to Italian politicians by British petrol companies. Granada alleged that Mr Andreotti was the man code-named “Mr Anderson” by the oilmen and that he had an "intimate relationship with the petrol companies.” Mr Andreotti has steadfastly denied receiving money either from the C.I.A. or from Shell and BP. Mr Andreotti did at least gain credit for consenting to be interviewed by Granada; he was the only politician to do so.

This, then, is Italy’s new Prime Minister-designate, someone who owes all he has to the sort of murky political practices against which more than 70 per cent of the Italian electorate voted on June 20.

It is an extraordinary illustration of what the Christian Democrats had in

mind when they campaigned before the election on the slogan “The new Christian Democracy has already started.” Not only have they pushed Giulio Andreotti forward as their man for Prime Minister, but they have also placed an arch-conservative, Mr Amintore Fanfani, as President, of the Senate, or upper Parliamentary chamber, and confirmed their two Parliamentary House leaders, Messrs Piccoli and Bartolomei, two old-style Christian Democrats par excellence, in their former posts. The immediate post-elec-toral period has scarcely been encouraging for those who had placed their hopes on the Christian Democrats’ willingness to abandon their past and chart a new course. It now looks increasingly likely that Mr Andreotti will form a minority one-party Administration after the requisite number of roundtable consultations and latenight bargaining sessions. A new alliance with the Socialists, Italy’s third largest party after the Christian Democrats and the Communists, is now firmly out of the question after the resignation of its leader Mr Francesco de Martino; and the break-up of its entire Leftwing faction. But there is still one rabbit which he could pull out of his hat and perhaps satisfy the demands from the Left for a new role for the strengthened Communist Party. It is now being suggested that as the man who enjoys the confidence both of Washington and of the

Church, he just may be the one Christian Democrat who coulc. do a deal with the Communist leader, Mr Berlinguer. If Mr Andreotti agrees to demands from the Socialist Party that any governmentforming negotiations must take place in a multi-party framework, and that they must include the Communists, he might feel able to draw up a government programme which the Communists would grant their benevolent abstention in parliament. It is of no inconsiderable relevance that he has frequently been quoted as saying that he regards a government’s programme as of far more importance than the question of which parties support it in parliament. He is also regarded as a man with so many enemies within his own party that he will probably not be reluctant to make a few more. That could mean the end of the inglorious career of Mr Mariano Rumor, a former Foreign Minister, five times a Prime Minister, and now identified in press reports as the man codenamed “Antelope Cobbler” at the centre of the Lockheed bribes scandal.

It may also mean goodbye to Mr Emilio Colombo, the long-time Treasury Minister reviled by the Communists as the man most responsible for Italy’s dire economic plight. Some rumours in Rome have Mr Colombo being kicked gently upstairs to take a job in the E.E.C. Commission in Brussels at the end of the ' year. — 0.F.N.3. Copyright.