Amintore Fanfani
Amintore Fanfani was an Italian politician and statesman who served as 32nd prime minister of Italy for five separate terms. He was one of the best-known Italian politicians after the Second World War and a historical figure of the left-wing faction of Christian Democracy. He is also considered one of the founders of the modern Italian centre-left.
Beginning as a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, Fanfani achieved cabinet rank at a young age and occupied all the major offices of state over the course of a forty-year political career. In foreign policy, he was one of the most vocal supporters of European integration and established closer relations with the Arab world. In domestic policy, he was known for his cooperation with the Italian Socialist Party, which brought to an alliance that radically changed the country, by such measures as the nationalization of Enel, the extension of compulsory education, and the introduction of a more progressive tax system.
Fanfani served in numerous ministerial positions, including Minister of the Interior, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Labour, Minister of Agriculture, and Minister of Budget and Economic Planning. He served also as president of the Senate of the Republic for three terms between 1968 and 1987. He was appointed senator for life in 1972. Six years later, after the resignation of Giovanni Leone, he provisionally assumed the functions of president of the Italian Republic as chairman of the upper house of the Italian Parliament until the election of Sandro Pertini. Despite his long political experience and personal prestige, Fanfani never succeeded in being elected head of state, and died at the age on 91 on 22 November 1999.
Fanfani and the long-time liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti still hold the record as the only statesmen to have served as prime minister of Italy in five non-consecutive periods of office. He was sometimes nicknamed Cavallo di Razza, thanks to his innate political ability; however, his detractors simply called him "Pony" due to his small size.
Early life
Fanfani was born in Pieve Santo Stefano, in the province of Arezzo, Tuscany, in a middle-class family. His father, Giuseppe Fanfani, was a carpenter's son who succeeded in studying and graduating in law, starting the profession of lawyer and notary; while his mother Annita Leo was a housewife. Fanfani, who was the first of nine children, grew up in an observant Catholic family. Fanfani was named after Amintore Galli, who composed the socialist anthem the Workers' Hymn; Fanfani's siblings were similarly named with eclectic or unusual names.In 1920, at 12 years old, Fanfani joined Catholic Action, of which he became a local leader after a few years. After attending the scientific lyceum of Arezzo, he graduated in political and economic sciences in 1930 at the Catholic University of Milan, with the thesis "Economic Repercussions and Effects of the English Schism". He was the author of a number of important works on economic history dealing with religion and the development of capitalism in the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation in Europe. His thesis was published in Italian and then in English as Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism in 1935.
Under the regime of Benito Mussolini, Fanfani joined the National Fascist Party supporting the corporatist ideas of the regime promoting collaboration between the classes, which he defended in many articles. He once wrote: "Some day the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles." Fanfani wrote for the official magazine of racism in Fascist Italy, The Defence of the Race. In 1938, he was among the 330 that signed the antisemitic Manifesto of Race, culminating in laws that stripped the Italian Jews of any position in the government, university, or professions that many previously had. Fanfani also became a professor at the School of Fascist Mysticism in Milan.
On 22 April 1939, Fanfani married Biancarosa Provasoli, a 25-year-old lady who grew up in a bourgeois family from Milan. The couple had two sons and five daughters, born between 1940 and 1955. During the years spent in Milan, Fanfani met Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. They formed a group known as the "little professors" who lived ascetically in monastery cells and walked barefoot. They formed the nucleus of Democratic Initiative, an intensely Catholic but economically reformist wing of the post-war Christian Democracy party, holding meetings to discuss Catholicism and society. In Milan, Fanfani wrote "Catholicism and Protestantism in the historical development of Capitalism", in which he proposed a bold interpretation of the phenomena of capitalism, with particular reference to the conditioning of the religious factors and fundamentally disagree with the thesis of Max Weber. This work brought him to the forefront among US Catholics. After the surrender of Italy to the Allied armed forces on 8 September 1943, the group disbanded. Until the liberation of Italy in April 1945, Fanfani fled to Switzerland dodging military service, and organized university courses for Italian refugees.
Early political career
Upon his return to Italy, Fanfani joined the newly founded DC, of which his friend Dossetti was serving as deputy secretary. He was as one of the youngest party leaders and a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, the undisputed leader of the party for the following decade. Fanfani represented a particular ideological position, that of conservative Catholics who favoured socio-economic interventionism, which was very influential in the 1950s and 1960s but gradually lost its appeal. He once wrote: "Capitalism requires such a dread of loss, such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood, such a certainty that a man's neighbour is merely a customer to be gained or a rival to be overthrown, and all these are inconceivable in the Catholic conception... There is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life." In his view, private economic initiative was justifiable only if harnessed to the common good.In the 1946 Italian general election, Fanfani was elected to the Constituent Assembly for the constituency of Siena–Arezzo–Grosseto, which would remain his political stronghold for all his career. As a constituent, he was appointed in the commission that drafted the text of the new republican Italian Constitution. The first article of the new constitution reflected Fanfani's philosophy. He proposed an article, which read "Italy is a democratic republic founded on labor". In the 1948 Italian general election, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, with more than 35,000 votes.
Under De Gasperi, Fanfani took on a succession of ministries. From June 1947 until January 1950, he served as Minister of Labour; while from July 1951 to July 1953, he was Minister of Agriculture, and from July 1953 to January 1954 he served as Minister of the Interior in the caretaker government of Giuseppe Pella. As Minister of Labour, he developed the so-called "Fanfani house" program for government-built workers' homes and put 200,000 of Italy's unemployed to work on a reforestation program. As Minister of Agriculture, he set in motion much of the Christian Democrats' land reform program. According to a news report in Time magazine, "He can keep going for 36 hours on catnaps, apples and a few sips of water", and when someone proposed Fanfani for another ministry, De Gasperi refused, stating: "If I keep on appointing Fanfani to various ministries, I am sure that one of these days I will open the door to my study and find Fanfani sitting at my desk."
Leader of Christian Democracy and prime minister
First government
On 12 January 1954, after 5 months in power, Prime Minister Giuseppe Pella was forced to resign, after a strong confrontation with many members of DC, regarding the appointment of Salvatore Aldisio as new Minister of Agriculture. Fanfani was then appointed by President Luigi Einaudi as new head of the government. Fanfani formed a one-party government composed only by members of the Christian Democracy. He chose, among others, Giulio Andreotti, another protégé of De Gasperi, as Minister of the Interior, Adone Zoli as Minister of Finance and Paolo Emilio Taviani as Minister of Defence.The cabinet lasted 23 days when it failed to win approval in the Parliament, being rejected by the Chamber of Deputies with 260 votes in favor, 303 votes against and 12 abstentions out of 563 present. On 10 February 1954, Mario Scelba sworn in as new prime minister. Fanfani's first government was the shortest-lived cabinet in the history of the Italian Republic. Since De Gasperi's retirement in 1953 Fanfani emerged as the most probable successor, a role confirmed by his appointment as party secretary in June 1954, a position that he would held until March 1959.
Secretary of Christian Democracy
As secretary, Fanfani reorganized and rejuvenated the national party organization of the DC, decreasing its strong dependence on the Catholic Church and the national government that had typified the De Gasperi period. During his tenure, he built a close relation with Enrico Mattei, the CEO of Eni. They remained key allies until Mattei's death in October 1962.Fanani's activist and sometimes authoritarian style, as well as his reputation as an economic reformer, ensured that the moderate and the right-wingers within the DC, who opposed the state's intrusion into the country's economic life, regarded him with distrust. His indefatigable energy and his passion for efficiency carried him far in politics, but he was rarely able to exploit fully the opportunities that he created. As an anonymous Christian Democrat bigwig once remarked: "Fanfani has colleagues, associates, acquaintances and subordinates, but I have never heard much about his friends."
In May 1955, Einaudi's term as president of the Italian Republic came to an end, and Parliament had to choose his successor. Fanfani was promoting for the office the liberal Cesare Merzagora, who was then president of the Senate; however, the right-wing of the party, led by Pella and Andreotti, organized an internal coup to get Giovanni Gronchi elected instead. The move received the surprising support of the Italian Communist Party and Italian Socialist Party, as well as the Monarchist National Party and the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement . After a bitter battle and the final crumbling of the centrist front, Gronchi was elected president of the Italian Republic on 29 April 1955, with 658 votes out of 883.
During his secretariat, Fanfani built good relations both with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, culminated to a state visit to Washington, D.C., in August 1956. The brutal suppression of 1956 Hungarian Revolution saw him coordinating a strong anti-communist propaganda in the country.