ABSTRACT

The establishment of the new democratic framework in post-fascist Italy was achieved largely by the political parties which had led the Resistance. They devised the new institutions and legitimized the new regime, above all by involving in it those sectors of the population which previously had been marginal or absent from political life. Christian Democracy (DC), as heir to the Partito Popolare, had to perform the task of transferring the loyalties of the rural Catholic masses-once disenfranchised by papal opposition to the new unitary Italian state-on to the new liberaldemocratic framework. The Italian Communist Party (PCI), heir to the Italian Socialist tradition (or, at least, to its maximalist wing) had to do the same for the working classes.