«Moro began to die long before when, after thirty years of uninterrupted hegemony, the DC and its leading role in the political system were called into question by the results of the 1975 local elections which brought the Catholic party back to the same percentage obtained in 1946 in the voting for the Constituent Assembly, 35.21%. Apparently a marginal event, a loss of three percentage points compared to the results obtained in previous consultations.
But if we broaden our gaze to the extraordinary success of the largest opposition party, the PCI, which rises to more than 33% – only two percentage points less than the DC – we get the measure of what an earthquake is taking place in the Italian political framework . Moreover, the decline in support for Catholics was largely part of the processes of secularization that had profoundly changed Italian society throughout the 1960s and beyond, freeing it from the heavy legacies of fascism and the strict control of the Catholic Church. Italy’s conformity to the values, lifestyles and methods of production of its European partners in the EEC showed the limits of a system based on parties, now in trouble in the face of these transformations which would have required an overall renewal of their models and the political system. In the Christian Democratic leadership group, Moro had been one of the few to realize since 1968, in the midst of the student protests, how urgent the renewal of the DC and the political system was. The first real shock had come in 1974, and was only a prelude to disaster in the following year’s elections.
Because the victory of the Nos in the referendum on the divorce law was not only proof of how much society had changed, but also prefigured an unprecedented convergence between political forces – secularists, socialists, communists – which created an alternative majority (only on paper, naturally). That same majority, however, which in the largest cities of Italy elected the mayors and the “red councils” in 1975, inaugurating a new political season that would cost Moro his life.” Thus the prof. Claudio Signorile in “The Moro case between politics and history”, the two-voice dialogue with Simona Colarizi, in the bookshop in the Gli Scarabei series by Baldini+Castoldi. Colarizi highlights how «From December 1969 with the attack in Piazza Fontana in Milan, the terrible season of massacres was inaugurated, destined like that of red terrorism to last well beyond the assassination of Moro. The extent to which the bomb at the Agricultural Bank constituted an alibi for the birth of the Red Brigades is a thesis with which repentant Red Brigade members have always tried to justify their criminal actions.
In reality the much more complex discussion must also be brought back to the disarray of the younger generations, the result of a process of social, economic and cultural transformation so accelerated as to erase the certainties of the fathers in the space of just a decade. (…) In retrospect, many have ended up attributing all the responsibility for this tragic season of blood to the protests of 1968 in which the seed of violence had taken root; however, the discussion would take us far, even if it must be said that some of the militants of the first armed groups and numerous supporters of the Red Brigades had nested within the small groups of the extra-parliamentary left who also had a direct and indirect link with Aldo’s kidnappers. Moro. Just as many young neo-fascists, coming from the ranks of the Fuan, the University National Action Front, acted as laborers for the strategists of the tension.” In this two-voice dialogue it is once again Signorile who recalls how «we cannot talk about the “K factor”, as the journalist Alberto Ronchey had defined it, almost as if it were a sudden discovery after the leap forward of the PCI in the 1975 local elections .
The “communist question” dates back to 1945 when the Communist Party was already an operating reality and conditioning the entire life of the country. The history of this republican half century has been woven with the common thread of a growing consensus, widespread and cultivated by the PCI throughout the country, in different forms and places: regions, provinces, municipalities, local authorities, trade unions, third sector, universities , school and in the entire organization of culture and the media. After the Second World War, the guardians of the balance established at Yalta had directed much of their attention to the communist parties of Southern Europe overlooking the Mediterranean, all territories that were indispensable strategic hubs for the nations of the Atlantic Alliance (…) After the conflict and division of Europe, in Western countries the communist danger had been managed politically, as had happened in the Federal Republic of Germany with the outlawing of the Kpd (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands). In Italy it didn’t go like this. The PCI, still lower (slightly) than the number of votes received by the socialists in the elections for the Constituent Assembly in 1946, already in 1948, with more than 20% of the votes, could not be suppressed by law. Beyond the risks for the maintenance of public order of unleashing insurrectionary movements, which could have also triggered direct or indirect involvement of the United States, a contradiction would have arisen with the constitutional values on which Italian democracy had been founded, as soon as born after the long years of the fascist dictatorship, and the consequences would have been destabilizing for the republican institutions.
The choice of Togliatti had been rewarded who, compared to the leaders of the other Western communist parties, had focused on a national-popular PCI, renouncing any form of subversive struggle. The result, however, was to force the English, American, German and Italian services into complex intelligence work, to identify and prevent a growth of communist power, dangerous for NATO but also for the Soviet Union, always fearful that Togliatti and his successors, feeling gradually stronger, loosened or even cut the umbilical cord with Moscow. Hence the mirror mobilization of the KGB, also present in Italy with its well-trained spies.”
(Claudio Signorile, Simona Colarizi, “The Moro case between politics and history”, Baldini+Castoldi, in bookshops from 7 May)
