The PLI, which was heir to the liberal currents of both the Historical Right and the Historical Left, was a minor party after World War II, but also a frequent junior party in government, especially after 1979. It originally represented the right-wing of the Italian liberal movement, while the Italian Republican Party the left-wing. The PLI disintegrated in 1994 following the fallout of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal and was succeeded by several minor parties. The party's most influential leaders were Giovanni Giolitti, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Malagodi.
The Right was opposed by its more progressive counterpart, the Historical Left, which overthrew Marco Minghetti's government during the so-called "parliamentary revolution" of 1876, which brought Agostino Depretis to become Prime Minister. However, Depretis immediately began to look for support among Rightists MPs, who readily changed their positions, in a context of widespread corruption. This phenomenon, known in Italian as trasformismo (roughly translatable in English as "transformism" — in a satirical newspaper, the PM was depicted as a chameleon), effectively removed political differences in Parliament, which was dominated by an undistinguished liberal bloc with a landslide majority until World War I.
Two liberal parliamentary factions alternated in government, a conservative one led by Sidney Sonnino and a progressive one led by Giovanni Giolitti, who started as a member of the Historical Left and served as Prime Minister in 1982–1983, 1903–1905, 1906–1909, 1911–1914 and 1920–1921. Giolitti, whose faction was by far the largest, sought to unify the liberal establishment into a united party, the Liberal Union, in 1913, also with the participation of Sonnino. The Liberals governed in alliance with the Radicals, the Democrats and, eventually, the Reformist Socialists.[4]
At the end of World War I, universal suffrage and proportional representation were introduced. These reforms caused big problems to the Liberals, who found themselves unable to stop the rise of two mass parties, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Italian People's Party (PPI), which had taken the control of many local authorities in northern Italy even before the war. Through the Christian-democratic PPI, Catholics, who were long inactive due to the trauma of the capture of Rome and the struggles between the Holy See and the Italian state, started to be involved in politics, in opposition to both the PSI and the liberal establishment, which had governed the country for virtually sixty years.
The Parliament was thus fundamentally divided in three different blocs and fragmentation brought about instability, with the Socialists and the rising Fascist instigators of political violence on opposite sides. In this chaotic situation, in 1922 the Liberals re-grouped within the Italian Liberal Party (PLI), which immediately joined an alliance led by the National Fascist Party and formed with it a joint list for the 1924 general election, transforming the Fascists from a small political force into an absolute-majority party. The PLI, which failed to subdue the Fascists, was banned by Benito Mussolini in 1926, along with all the other parties, while many old Liberal politicians were given prestigious, but not influential, political posts, such as seats in the Senate, which was stripped of any real power by the Fascist reforms.
The PLI was re-established in 1943 by Benedetto Croce, a prominent intellectual and senator, whose international recognition and parliamentary membership allowed him to remain a free man during the Fascist regime, despite being an anti-fascist himself, and joined the National Liberation Committee. After the end of World War II, Enrico De Nicola, a Liberal, became "provisional Head of State" and another one, Luigi Einaudi, who as Minister of Economy and Governor of the Bank of Italy between 1945 and 1948 had reshaped Italian economy, succeeded him as President of Italy.
In the 1946 general election the PLI, as part of the National Democratic Union, won 6.8% of the vote, which was somewhat below expectations for a coalition representing the pre-Fascist political establishment. Indeed, the Union was supported by all the survivors of the Italian political class before the rise of Fascism, from Vittorio Emanuele Orlando to Radical Francesco Saverio Nitti. In its first years, the PLI was home to very different ideological factions and, for instance, it was successively led by Leone Cattani, a representative of the internal left, and then by Roberto Lucifero, a monarchist-conservative. In 1948 Bruno Villabruna, a moderate, was elected secretary and sought to re-unite all the Liberals under the party (also Cattani, who had left the party after Lucifero's election, returned into the fold).
In Giovanni Malagodi the PLI found a consequential leader. Under his 18 years at the head, Malagodi moved the party further to the right on economic issues. This caused in 1956 the exit of the party's left-wing, including Cattani, Villabruna, Eugenio Scalfari and Marco Pannella, who established the Radical Party. In particular, the PLI opposed the new centre-left coalition which also included the Italian Socialist Party, and presented itself as the main conservative party in Italy.
Malagodi managed to draw some votes from the Italian Social Movement, the Monarchist National Party and especially Christian Democracy, whose electoral base was mainly composed of conservatives suspicious of the Socialists, increasing the party's share to a historical record of 7.0% in the 1963 general election. After Malagodi's resignation from the party's leadership, the PLI was defeated with a humiliating 1.3% in the 1976 general election, but tried to re-gain strength by repositioning in the political centre and supporting social reforms supported by the Radicals, such as divorce.
In 1992–1994 the Italian party system was shaken by the uncovering of the corruption system nicknamed Tangentopoli by the Mani pulite investigation. In the first months, the PLI seemed immune to investigation. However, as the investigations further unravelled, the party turned out to be part of the corruption scheme, along with its coalition partners. Francesco De Lorenzo, the Liberal Minister of Health, was one of the most loathed politicians in Italy for his corruption, that involved stealing funds from the sick and allowing commercialisation of medicines based on bribes.
Dissolution and diaspora
The party was disbanded on 6 February 1994 and at least four heirs tried to take its legacy:
The party was re-founded in 1997 by Stefano De Luca and re-took its original name in 2004. The new PLI gathered some of the former right-wing Liberals, but soon distanced itself from the centre-right coalition, led by FI, to follow an autonomous path and try to unite all the Liberals, from left to right, in a single party.
Before World Wars the Liberals constituted the political establishment that governed Italy for decades. They had their main bases in Piedmont, where many leading liberal politicians of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of Italy came from, and southern Italy. The Liberals never gained large support after World War II as they were not able to become a mass party and were replaced by Christian Democracy (DC) as the dominant political force. In the 1946 general election, the first after the war, the PLI gained 6.8% as part of the National Democratic Union. At that time they were strong especially in the South, as DC was mainly rooted in the North: 21.0% in Campania, 22.8% in Basilicata, 10.4% in Apulia, 12.8% in Calabria and 13.6% in Sicily.[29]
However, the party soon found its main constituency in the industrial elites of the "industrial triangle" formed by the metropolitan areas of Turin, Milan and Genoa. The PLI had its best results in the 1960s, when it was rewarded by conservative voters for its opposition to the participation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in government. The party won 7.0% of the vote in 1963 (15.2% in Turin, 18.7% in Milan and 11.5% in Genoa) and 5.8% in 1968. The PLI suffered a decline in the 1970s and settled around 2–3% in the 1980s, when its strongholds were reduced to Piedmont, especially the provinces of Turin and Cuneo, and, to a minor extent, western Lombardy, Liguria and Sicily.[30] By the end of the 1980s, similarly to the other parties of the Pentapartito coalition (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Republicans and Democratic Socialists), the Liberals strengthened their grip on the South, while in the North they lost some of their residual votes to Lega Nord. In the 1992 general election, the last before the Tangentopoli scandals, the PLI won 2.9% of the vote, largely thanks to the increase of votes from the South.[30] After the end of the "First Republic" former Liberals were very influential within Forza Italia (FI) in Piedmont, Liguria and, strangely enough, in Veneto, where a former Liberal, Giancarlo Galan, was three times elected president.
^Raffaella Y. Nanetti; Robert Leonardi (2014). "Italy". In M. Donald Hancock; Christopher J. Carman; Marjorie Castle; David P. Conradt; Raffaella Y. Nanetti; Robert Leonardi; William Safran; Stephen White (eds.). Politics in Europe. CQ Press. p. 363. ISBN978-1-4833-2305-3.
^Jones, Erik; Pasquino, Gianfranco (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 456.
^Jannazzo, Antonio (2003). Il liberalismo italiano del Novecento: da Giolitti a Malagodi. Rubbettino Editore. p. 43.
^ abGünter Trautmann (1984). "Entpolitisierung und demographischer Machtwechsel in den politischen Systemen Frankreichs und Italiens seit 1972/73". In Jürgen W. Falter; Christian Fenner; Michael Th. Greven (eds.). Politische Willensbildung und lnteressenvermittlung. p. 185. doi:10.1007/978-3-663-14338-3. ISBN978-3-663-14338-3.
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