Vol. 71/No. 11      March 19, 2007

Prodi’s coalition defeated Forza Italia, a rightist party led by Silvio Berlusconi, last April in one of Italy’s closest elections. Berlusconi was prime minister from 2001 to 2006. His cabinet included the fascist-oriented Northern League.

During his first nine months in office, Prodi reaffirmed the deployment of Italian troops to Afghanistan as part of the NATO forces there, initiated by Berlusconi’s regime.

A February 21 vote in the Senate on a government-backed resolution to keep the nearly 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan led to a political crisis for the Prodi regime. The resolution also called for backing Washington’s request to double the size of the U.S. military base in Vicenza, Italy, where the entire U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade would be based.

Among those voting against the Prodi-backed resolution were Franco Turigliatto of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC) and Fernando Rossi of the Italian Communist Party. Both groups are part of a nine-party coalition led by Prodi’s Christian Democrats and other capitalist parties. The two senators actually abstained, but Senate rules translate that to a “no” vote.

The resolution failed to win a majority by two votes. In response, Prodi submitted his resignation that evening.

The leadership of the two Stalinist parties acted swiftly to keep Prodi’s regime in office. “The government must continue,” said Franco Giordano, a leader of the PRC, in response to a call by the Northern League for Prodi to resign.

Two days after the Senate vote the PRC expelled Turigliatto from the group for what party leaders described as “a breach that could not be healed,” reported the New York Times. “We reaffirm our faith in the prime minister,” the party said in a statement, “and confirm a loyal and effective collaboration.”

A declaration issued by Fabio Amato, head of the PRC’s International Department, elaborated on the importance the Stalinist party places on backing the governing coalition. “The gravity of what has happened at the Senate,” it said, is “in having caused a shift in the political line of the Party using his [Turigliatto’s] privileged position as an MP [Member of Parliament]. Other senators of the PRC spoke in the chamber declaring their dissent but then they voted for the motion, as it was decided.”

Within days, Prodi was back in charge of the government. Italian president Giorgio Napolitano rejected his resignation, asking him instead to win a majority in a vote of confidence in both houses of parliament. On February 28, he succeeded in the Senate in a 162 to 157 vote. The following day the lower house voted to back Prodi by 342 to 253.

The political course of Italy’s Stalinist parties is similar to that of the French Communist Party and most of the middle-class left in the French elections five years earlier.

In the first round of voting there in 2002 ultrarightist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen edged out Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin. Le Pen now faced President Jacques Chirac of the capitalist Gaullist party. The French CP, Socialist Party, the Greens, and much of the left urged people to “hold their nose but vote Chirac” in order to “build a dam against fascism.”

Chirac won that election, ensuring continuity in Paris’s offensive against working people at home and abroad, with the backing of “workers’” parties. The Stalinists in Italy just gave the ruling class there a hand in doing the same.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home