NICOLA ANTONETTI

Luigi Sturzo e il problema  della rappresentanza parlamentare nella crisi dello stato liberale  

N. 2/1985

Summary – Sturzo was a staunch supporter of the representative form of government, convinced as he was of the historical superiority of the liberal system in comparison with both dynastic absolutism and the utopia of direct democracy. In his opinion, liberalism permitted the masses to enter into political representative organisms but at the same time, since it viewed the sovereignty of the people as the only source of state authority, it opened the way towards totalitarianism. Sturzo, instead, basing himself on the principles of Christian democratic culture, on the one hand supported the classic division of state powers while on the other he asserted that the control and guidance of public authority were the tasks of organized groups in civil society. As national secretary of the PPI, Sturzo operated for the transformation of parliamentary institutions through these groups and in this way he went beyond the concepts of catholic corporativism. His activity developed along two main lines: firstly, the definition of a new equilibrium between the two parliamentary bodies and the relationship of this legislative branch of government with that of the executive and of the monarchy; secondly, the separation of parliamentary party representation from existing special interests. He defended proportional representation for the Chamber of Deputies as the way to give power to the mass parties and thus express the "electoral consciousness" of the people while weakening the parliamentary élites. He proposed, moreover, that the Senate, at that time appointed by the King, be elected through the representation of the country’s specific groupings (cultural, administrative, military, territorial, etc.). In this way, according to Sturzo, it would be possible to redefine clearly the powers of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and to allow an efficient control of the government. Sturzo was convinced that the failure of his projects of parliamentary reform brought about above all by the fact that the capitalist model, established in Italy through the protectionist policy of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, had led to the centralization and burocratization of the liberal state. It had thus provoked, as the only alternative, the socialist push towards a state which would be both producer and distributor of wealth; as a consequence, the peasants and the middle classes were disregarded and deprived of substantial parliamentary representation. In this way they came to be attracted by the corporativist illusion proposed and later imposed by nationalists and fascists. For Sturzo the parliamentary representation of the "economic corporations" under the fascist dictatorship was only a fiction.