Muddle in Milan

For more than a year wily Pietro Nenni, egg-bald boss of Italy's Socialist Party, has wriggled uneasily under public pressure for a merger between his forces and Giuseppe Saragat's small but influential Social Democratic Party. The question was: Did Nenni care enough about Socialist reunification to abandon his decade-old alliance with Italy's Communists?

Two weeks ago, after months of artful dodging, Nenni made it clear that he did not. To Communist applause, he alone among Western European Socialists responded favorably to Nikita Khrushchev's call for a united Marxist front against U.S. "intrigue" in the Middle East (TIME, Oct. 28). And last week, as the Social Democrats wound up their first party congress in two years, it was no longer Nenni but Saragat who was wriggling under the pressure for "Socialist unification."

Crowding into Milan's seedy, smoke-filled Halcyon Theater, 547 Social Democratic bigwigs shouted and orated in impressive abstract discussions of Marxist theory, but were unable even to agree on a platform for Italy's general elections, now only six months off. After years of unchallenged dominance of the party, moody, long-faced Giuseppe Saragat, 59, twice Vice Premier of Italy, was seriously threatened by 36-year-old Matteo Matteotti, whose only program was unification after the elections. Matteotti did not explain how Social Democrats could win votes by, in effect, promising to become Nenni Socialists right after elections.

Saragat's answer was the one he has made ever since the merger was first discussed: "Unification cannot date from the elections but only from Nenni's break with the Communists." Saragat carried the day, but only by a narrow margin. Then, drawn and ailing--he has a serious hyperthyroid condition--he headed off for a month's rest in the mountains. Behind him he left a party frozen in factionalism and no longer able to capitalize on its greatest electoral appeals--the useful services it performed during the years when its leaders held high office in coalition with the ruling Demo-Christian Party.

In the aftermath of dissension, there seemed little remaining hope that the Social Democrats could ever lure Italy's left-wing voters from the Communist-tainted banner of Pietro Nenni. As for unification, Nenni made clear he no longer considered the Social Democrats in any position to demand concessions from him.

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