Italy: anti-system opposition within the system

Extract

There is no need, perhaps, to repeat that as in other European countries, and especially France, but not in Great Britain and the United States, the most characteristic feature of Italy’s contemporary political life is the fact that within its liberal-democratic political system the main opposition is carried on by a party or parties which deny in principle the structure and purposes of the liberal-democratic state, and the values of electoral representation and its institutions. The interchange between government and opposition in countries like Great Britain and the United States is centred around the agreement between the parties to play fair and to acknowledge the rules of the parliamentary process as the permanent basis of the country’s political life. But the communist parties, and in the countries where they still exist the fascist or neo-fascist parties, reject these principles and proclaim that when they come to power they will replace them by forms of ‘direct’ or ‘all people’s’ democracies. This ideological argument about the respective merits of the purely political or parliamentary and the social-economic centralized forms of democracy is at the core of the doctrinal discussion between the communists and the neo-fascist parties, and the other Italian parties.