ABSTRACT
The decline of a governing party from dominance to near extinction is a phenomenon less rare than it used to be. But outside the old Soviet bloc, in stable liberal democracies, such events are still remarkable. The decline of the DC has been spectacular in its rapidity and completeness. The Christian Democrats were Italy’s dominant party in the first four decades of the postwar Republic. Their national vote never dropped below 34 per cent from 1948 to 1987. They provided every Prime Minister from December 1945 to June 1981, and several thereafter. Their ministers occupied influential posts in every government of the post-war period up to April 1993, their elected local councillors controlled most of the major cities in coalition, and their appointees managed the largest proportion of Italy’s public sector finance and industry. Even in the parliamentary elections of 1992, they were the largest single party, with 29.7 per cent of the national vote and 207 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, Their power was such that Italian politics was categorised by some as a dominant party system, one in which there was no real alternative to the main party of government. But by the 1994 elections they had ceased to exist as a party. Their main successor, the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), won 11.7 per cent of the proportional vote and (with a splinter group) 46 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Another splinter group, the Christian Democratic Centre, won seats within the new dominant grouping led by Forza Italia and were rewarded with two ministerial posts. Other than these two ministers, political Catholicism has lost all its formal trappings of power. More importantly, it has lost its capacity to make the informal rules by which public money and public sector jobs of all kinds were allocated. No longer are the banal speculations of minor DC backbenchers subjected to reverential analysis by journalists in case they might imply subtle shifts in the balance of power between factions. The muchvaunted apparent permanence of their role has been proved illusory. Their leaders, the old names of one of Europe’s most long-lasting ruling groups, have disappeared from the front pages. An entire political elite has been replaced.
