Christmas, usually a political dead season, was enlivened in Italy by the election of a new president. Indeed, on Christmas Day itself, deputies, senators, regional representatives, ex-presidents, etc, trooped into the Palazzo Montecitorio—368 to say ‘I abstain’ and another 100 to drop a blank paper into the urn. Eventually, after 21 ballots and 12 days, Giuseppe Saragat received the necessary absolute majority and was declared President. His election was, above all, a blow to the Christian Democratic party, the dominant partner in the ruling centre-left coalition: they were confronted, for the first time since the war, with a president who was not one of their own but came from a lay party and, what seemed even worse, had been elected by the switch of Communist votes at the decisive moment. The centre-left coalition and the Christian Democratic party had been revealed as spectacularly divided among themselves and incredibly inept. The Christian Democrats had half anticipated discomfiture: although President Segni was paralyzed by a stroke, they had delayed replacing him as long as possible by exploiting the lack of any clear constitutional procedure for declaring him incapable. And when it finally came, it came at a cheerlessly sensitive time: shortly after the coalition had seen its vote slump badly at the municipal elections, in an atmosphere of mounting discontent (both within and without the government) at the dust gathering on its legislative programme.

The ebbs and flows of the election were exceedingly complex, but it is worth giving some account of them: it is rare that the workings and tensions of party caucuses and coalitions are so transparent to the observer. The role of president is not entirely formal. He has patronage at his disposal, he can intervene decisively in the political flux, he can contest certain ill-defined prerogatives with the Prime Minister. At any rate, it is a post which is coveted. To get it, a great deal of bargaining, bludgeoning and bidding for support is necessary. No less than seven parties put up their own candidate, each of them ready, if need be, to switch behind one of the others. Moreover, several of the parties—particularly the Christian Democratic party—are split among themselves and caucus leaders can muster votes quite outside the control of the official party secretary. The vote is secret and so discipline therefore is difficult to maintain: the only way to trace an elector’s vote is if he abstains. In these circumstances, tactical skill is at a premium; the leadership of the Christian Democrats needed it most of all; it turned out to have it least.

In 1959, a group of dissidents, since known as the dorotei, plotted at the Convent of St. Dorothy, near Rome, the downfall of Amintore Fanfani, at that time secretary of the Christian Democratic Party and Prime Minister. The intrigue was successful and today the dorotei control the party machine and are thus the hub of the centre-left coalition which they inherited from Fanfani. Power is shared: Moro, who has some following of his own, is Prime Minister; Rumor is party secretary; Colombo, the treasury minister, has the confidence of the Confindustria and big industrial capital; Bonomi, the head of the Federconsorzi, controls rural patronage and has a base among the sourthern landowners and farmers. The dorotei were able to count on well over half of the Christian Democrat electors and evidently felt strong enough to push through their own nominee, Giovanni Leone, a lawyer from Naples and former president of the chamber. They hoped to get the votes of most, if not quite all, of the centre-left coalition plus some support from the Liberals on the right and a few strays. There were, however, two principal obstacles: the candidacies of Saragat and Fanfani. Saragat, the Social Democrat foreign secretary, had made it quite clear that he wanted the post; sooner or later either he or Leone would have to withdraw in order to avoid splitting the centre-left vote. Fanfani had a score to settle with the dorotei. He could rely on a following of about 90 Christian Democrats, built up in the days when he controlled the machine and persisting as a pole of antagonism to the dorotei. He calculated that if there was a deadlock he could assemble a very heterogeneous majority stretching from the Communists right across to the Fascists and Monarchists, united by a wish to prise away the dorotei’s grasp on the system. He had pleased some on the left by canvassing the enlargement of the centre-left to include the Communists, others by the prospect of creating dissension in the Christian Democrat party and the ruling class at large; his autocratic personality and his record under fascism attracted the far right.