Democrazia Cristiana
Democrazia Cristiana (DC) was Italy's dominant postwar political party, governing continuously from 1945 to 1994 with CIA support during the Cold War, whose leading figures included Alcide De Gasperi, Aldo Moro, and Giulio Andreotti, and which dissolved in 1994 under the weight of the Tangentopoli corruption investigations.
Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy, DC) was the dominant political party of postwar Italy, founded on December 15, 1943, as the successor to the pre-fascist Partito Popolare Italiano and governing Italy without interruption from the first postwar elections in 1946 until 1994. Rooted in Catholic social teaching and anchored by the institutional support of the Catholic Church, the DC held the prime ministership for all but a few months of the entire postwar period until its dissolution in January 1994 under the pressure of the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) corruption investigations.1
Foundation and Early Governance
The DC was founded by Alcide De Gasperi, a former Habsburg-era parliamentary deputy who had survived the Mussolini years in exile at the Vatican. As Prime Minister from 1945 to 1953, De Gasperi steered Italy into the Western alliance, secured Marshall Plan assistance, and established the DC as the indispensable center of Italian political life.
The party's relationship with the CIA in its early years was institutionally close. The CIA, under Allen Dulles, provided financial support for DC electoral campaigns in the critical 1948 election, in which the party faced a joint Italian Communist Party-Socialist coalition. The 1948 result - DC victory with approximately 48% of the vote - was decisive in orienting Italy permanently toward the Western alliance rather than the neutralist or communist alternatives.1
Cold War Role and CIA Support
Throughout the Cold War the DC's governing position rested partly on CIA financial support, channeled through multiple mechanisms, and on the organizational structure of the Catholic Church. The CIA-DC relationship was less a conspiracy than an institutional alignment: both saw a communist government in Italy as catastrophic, and both had resources the other could use.
The Gladio stay-behind network was organized with the knowledge of DC governments and operated partly as an instrument of DC political survival. The P2 Masonic lodge penetrated the DC's institutional allies in the intelligence services, military, and media in ways that reinforced the party's grip on power while creating parallel power structures the party could not fully control.2
The Historic Compromise and Moro
The DC's most significant internal division in the 1970s was between the right wing, led by Giulio Andreotti and Amintore Fanfani, which opposed any engagement with the PCI, and the left wing, led by Aldo Moro, which advocated the "historic compromise" - formal cooperation between the DC and PCI that would bring the communists into government support.
Moro's kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades on March 16 - May 9, 1978 destroyed the political conditions for the compromise. The DC leadership's refusal to negotiate for Moro's release, maintained by Andreotti against the advocacy of Bettino Craxi and the Socialists, was one of the most consequential political decisions of the postwar period.2
Tangentopoli and Dissolution
The Tangentopoli investigations, initiated by Milan magistrates in February 1992, disclosed that the DC had maintained a systematic system of political financing through corporate bribes administered by party treasurers. The scale of the financing - involving virtually every major Italian corporation and every major party - and the DC's central role in it destroyed the party's credibility.
In January 1994 the DC formally dissolved and reconstituted itself as the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), a smaller center-left formation. Other DC factions joined the new center-right parties. After 50 years of continuous governance, the DC vanished from Italian politics within months of the corruption investigations' peak.1
Sources
- Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. Penguin, 1990. This is the standard English-language history of postwar Italy. ↩
- Ganser, Daniele. NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, 2005. Flamini, Gianni. Il Partito del Golpe. Bovolenta, 1982-1985. ↩
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