ABSTRACT
One cannot understand the history of Italy without taking into consideration the history of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC). This party, more than any other, played a very great role in the foundation and the development of the Italian Republic and participated in its successes and its crises. The DC was, up until its renaming and subsequent dissolution, the partito nazionale, the ‘party born for government’1 in Italy. It was the largest of all Christian democratic parties in Western Europe, with 1,612,730 members in 1963.2 Due to its supreme position in the Italian party system and its size, the DC had further special characteristics in comparison to other West European Christian democratic parties. These make an analysis of the development of the DC in a European context especially interesting.
