Victory for Modernity

In Milan and Florence, thousands of happy demonstrators poured into downtown piazzas. Euphoric banner-waving crowds jammed Rome's streets, blocking traffic and filling the huge Piazza Navona. In the Eternal City's working-class trattorias, flasks of Frascati white wine were broken out in celebration, while champagne corks popped merrily at Harry's Bar on the Via Veneto. Such an outpouring of emotion in Italy is usually reserved for the end of wars or the victories of national soccer teams. Last week's cheering, however, was a response to the outcome of the strangest--and perhaps one of the most significant--votes of Italy's postwar history. By a margin of 19,093,929 to 13,188,184 in a special referendum, Italians defeated an attempt to repeal the 3 1/2-year-old law permitting divorce.

Stump Speeches. For nearly two months, political leaders had turned from Italy's problems--social unrest, a 14.3% annual rate of inflation, and a possible $12 billion balance of payments deficit--while they stumped the country making fiery speeches for or against divorce. Former Premier Amintore Fanfani, boss of the Christian Democratic Party, led the fight for repeal, pleading with voters to save the "integrity of the family and future of our children." Communist Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer countered that divorce was "just and unexpendable."

Ironically, the divorce law had started no stampede of Italian couples eager to sever the bonds of wedlock. It is still the toughest divorce statute in Europe.

A five-year legal separation is required before courts will grant a divorce that is mutually agreed to by a husband and wife, while a seven-year waiting period is mandatory for a contested divorce.

Fewer than 70,000 marriages have been dissolved since Parliament passed the measure by a slim margin in December 1970. Nevertheless, opponents of the law collected 1.3 million signatures on petitions, nearly three times the number needed to force a referendum.

Throughout the heated campaign, the moral and legal issue of divorce was often overshadowed by the political battle between the two sides. In an odd amalgam of forces, the Christian Democrats found themselves aligned with the neo-Fascist M.S.I, in opposing divorce.

Just as awkwardly, the Socialists, Social Democrats and Republicans (who have been partners with the Christian Democrats since 1963 in Italy's string of center-left Cabinets) sided with the Communists in support of the law. Because of this lineup, the issue, for many voters, evolved into a classic contest of right v. left.

The referendum vote was a disaster for the neo-Fascists and a major setback for the church-backed Christian Democrats. The election results will likely weaken the already fragile two-month-old coalition government (Italy's 36th since the war) headed by Christian Democratic Premier Mariano Rumor. Though Rumor himself kept clear of the referendum, he will now be susceptible to pressures from his Socialist coalition partners. They might try to exploit their victory on divorce--the 1970 law was proposed by Socialist Deputy Loris Fortuna--by demanding more low-cost housing, better schools and hospitals, and increased investment in Italy's underindustrialized south.

For Fanfani, who was emerging as Italy's most powerful politician, the failure of the referendum was a bruising personal setback. "Until now Fanfani has run the Christian Democrats like a despot," said a Socialist official. "He won't be able to do that any more." The Communists, generally delighted by the outcome of the referendum, may find that the Christian Democrats' weakness will dim prospects for the "historic compromise" between left and right that Enrico Berlinguer has proposed between Italy's two largest parties.

Because the referendum touched directly on Roman Catholic Italy's traditional church-state conflict, the result was a severe defeat for the hierarchy and the Vatican. Bishops had told Catholics that they had a duty to "defend their model of the family"--a clear directive to repeal divorce. Most of the country's 190,000 priests and nuns campaigned vigorously for repeal; but many clerics defended divorce, and they were promptly disciplined by their superiors. After the balloting, Pope Paul VI expressed his "astonishment and pain" at the results. The referendum has already triggered new demands for revision of the 1929 concordat between Mussolini's government and the Vatican, which established Catholicism as Italy's official religion and still regulates church-state relations.

The referendum has signaled Italy's turning from its traditional Mediterranean, clergy-dominated past toward the modern, secular social idea of northern Europe. That, at least, is what the vote meant to Turin's staid newspaper La Stampa. After the results were in, it ran a banner headline: ITALY IS A MODERN COUNTRY!

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