Amintore Fanfani
Encyclopedia
Amintore Fanfani was an Italian career politician
Politician
A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...

 and the 33rd man to serve the office of Prime Minister
Prime minister of Italy
The Prime Minister of Italy is the head of government of the Italian Republic...

 of the State. He was one of the well-known Italian politicians after the Second World War, and a historical figure of the Christian Democracy
Christian Democracy (Italy)
Christian Democracy was a Christian democratic party in Italy. It was founded in 1943 as the ideological successor of the historical Italian People's Party, which had the same symbol, a crossed shield ....

 (Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

: Democrazia Cristiana – DC).

Fanfani and Giovanni Giolitti
Giovanni Giolitti
Giovanni Giolitti was an Italian statesman. He was the 19th, 25th, 29th, 32nd and 37th Prime Minister of Italy between 1892 and 1921. A left-wing liberal, Giolitti's periods in office were notable for the passage of a wide range of progressive social reforms which improved the living standards of...

 are still actually the sole men which became Prime ministers of Italy in five different periods. However, the sum of the days of Fanfani's five terms are 1571 (four years, 110 days), while Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...

 spent 1801 days (four years, 340 days) at office in his second term only (2001-2006). Fanfani was one of the dominant figures of the Italian Christian Democrats for over three decades.

Background

Fanfani was born in Pieve Santo Stefano
Pieve Santo Stefano
Pieve Santo Stefano is a comune in the Province of Arezzo in the Italian region Tuscany, located about 70 km east of Florence and about 25 km northeast of Arezzo....

, in the province of Arezzo
Province of Arezzo
The Province of Arezzo or Arretium is the easternmost province in the Tuscany region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Arezzo.It has an area of 3,232 km², and a total population of 323,288 in 39 comuni . At June 30, 2005, the main comuni by population are:- External links :...

, Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

, to a large and humble family. He graduated in economics and business in 1932 from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore is a privately-owned Catholic university founded in 1921 by Agostino Gemelli. Its main campus is located in Milan, Italy with satellite campuses in Brescia, Piacenza, Cremona, Rome, and Campobasso...

 in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

. He was the author of a number of important works on economic history dealing with religion and the development of capitalism in the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 and Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...

 in Europe. His thesis was published in Italian and then in English as Catholicism, Capitalism and Protestantism in 1935.

He joined the Italian fascist party
National Fascist Party
The National Fascist Party was an Italian political party, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of fascism...

 supporting the corporatist ideas of the regime promoting collaboration between the classes, which he defended in many articles. "Some day," he once wrote, "the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles."

He also wrote for the official magazine of racism in Fascist Italy, The Defence of the Race (Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

: La difesa della razza). In 1938, he was among the 330 that signed the antisemitic Manifesto of Race (Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

: Manifesto della razza) – culminating in laws that stripped the Italian Jews
Italian Jews
Italian Jews can be used in a broad sense to mean all Jews living or with roots in Italy or in a narrower sense to mean the ancient community who use the Italian rite, as distinct from the communities dating from medieval or modern times who use the Sephardi or Ashkenazi rite.-Divisions:Italian...

 of Italian citizenship and with it any position in the government or professions which many previous had.

During the years he spent in Milan, he knew Giuseppe Dossetti
Giuseppe Dossetti
Giuseppe Dossetti was an Italian jurist, a politician and from 1958 onward a Catholic priest.- The antifascist and politician :Dossetti was born in Genoa....

 and Giorgio La Pira
Giorgio La Pira
Giorgio La Pira was an Italian politician who served as mayor of Florence twice . He also served as deputy of the Christian Democratic Party and participated in the assembly that wrote the Constitution of Italy after World War II...

. They formed a group known as the "little professors" who lived ascetically in monastery cells and walked barefoot. They formed the nucleus of Democratic Initiative, an intensely Catholic but economically reformist wing of the post-war Christian Democratic Party, holding meetings to discuss Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

 and society. After the surrender of Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 with the Allied
Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...

 armed forces on 8 September, 1943, the group disbanded. Until the Liberation in April 1945, Fanfani fled to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 dodging military service, and organized university courses for refugee Italians.

Political career

Upon his return to Italy, he was elected vice-secretary of the newly founded Christian Democratic Party. He was as one of the youngest party leaders and a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi
Alcide De Gasperi
Alcide De Gasperi was an Italian statesman and politician and founder of the Christian Democratic Party. From 1945 to 1953 he was the prime minister of eight successive coalition governments. His eight-year rule remains a landmark of political longevity for a leader in modern Italian politics...

, the undisputed leader of the party for the following decade. Fanfani represented a particular ideological position, that of conservative Catholics who favoured socio-economic interventionism, which was very influential in the 1950s and 1960s but which gradually lost its appeal. "Capitalism requires such a dread of loss," he once wrote, "such a forgetfulness of human brotherhood, such a certainty that a man's neighbour is merely a customer to be gained or a rival to be overthrown, and all these are inconceivable in the Catholic conception ... There is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life." Private economic initiative, in his view, was justifiable only if harnessed to the common good.

He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and was a member of the Commission that drafted the text of the new Republican Constitution. The first article of the new constitution reflected Fanfani's philosophy. He proposed an article, which read: "Italy is a democratic republic founded on work." In 1948 he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies
Italian Chamber of Deputies
The Italian Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Parliament of Italy. It has 630 seats, a plurality of which is controlled presently by liberal-conservative party People of Freedom. Twelve deputies represent Italian citizens outside of Italy. Deputies meet in the Palazzo Montecitorio. A...

.

Under de Gasperi, Fanfani took on a succession of ministries. He was Minister of Labour from 1947–1948 and again from 1948–1950; Minister of Agriculture from 1951–1953; as well as Minister of the Interior in 1953 in the caretaker government of Giuseppe Pella
Giuseppe Pella
Giuseppe Pella was an Italian Christian Democratic politician who served as the 32nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1953 to 1954. He was also President of the European Parliament from 1954 to 1956 after the death of Alcide De Gasperi.He was born in Valdengo, Piedmont...

. As Minister of Labour, he developed the "Fanfani house" program for government-built workers' homes and put 200,000 of Italy's many unemployed to work on a reforestation program. As Minister of Agriculture, he set in motion much of the Christian Democrats' land reform program.

"He can keep going for 36 hours on catnaps, apples and a few sips of water," according to a news report in Time Magazine. Once, when someone proposed Fanfani for yet another ministry, De Gasperi refused. "If I keep on appointing Fanfani to various ministries, I am sure that one of these days I will open the door to my study and find Fanfani sitting at my desk," he said.

Reorganizing the party

After De Gasperi's retirement in 1953 Fanfani emerged as the anticipated successor, a role confirmed by his appointment as party secretary from 1954-1959. He reorganized and rejuvenated the national party organization of the Christian Democrats after the dependence on the church and the government which had typified the De Gasperi period.

However, his activist and sometimes authoritarian style, as well as his reputation as an economic reformer, ensured that the moderates within the DC, who opposed the state’s intrusion into the country’s economic life, regarded him with distrust. His indefatigable energy and his passion for efficiency carried him far in politics, but he was rarely able to exploit fully the opportunities that he created. "Fanfani has colleagues, associates, acquaintances and subordinates," one politician once remarked. "But I have never heard much about his friends."

Prime Minister

After the death of De Gasperi, from 1954 to the mid-1960s Fanfani's weight both in the party and in national politics was at its height. He served as Prime Minister in several of governments, some of them short-lived. His first government in 1954 lasted only 21 days when it failed to win approval in the Parliament. As Minister of the Interior, with orders to step up measures against Communist subversion, Fanfani had named young (35) Giulio Andreotti
Giulio Andreotti
Giulio Andreotti is an Italian politician of the now dissolved centrist Christian Democracy party. He served as the 42nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1972 to 1973, from 1976 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1992. He also served as Minister of the Interior , Defense Minister and Foreign Minister and he...

, another protégé of De Gasperi.

He became head of government again from July 1958 to January 1959, when his steamroller tactics lost him the support of his own Christian Democratic colleagues. He learned from the experience, and became wiser in the ways of cooperating and compromising. From July 1960 to February 1962, from February 1962 to May 1963, he was Prime Minister once more, securing the support of the Italian Socialist Party
Italian Socialist Party
The Italian Socialist Party was a socialist and later social-democratic political party in Italy founded in Genoa in 1892.Once the dominant leftist party in Italy, it was eclipsed in status by the Italian Communist Party following World War II...

 (Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

: Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), thus involving the centre-left in Italian politics.

He had been a leading proponent of such an "opening to the centre-left" for years. The opportunity arose when a liberal Pope, John XXIII, was elected in 1958, and the Socialists loosened their ties with the Communists. In February 1962 he reorganised his cabinet and gained the benign abstention of the PSI leader Pietro Nenni
Pietro Nenni
Pietro Sandro Nenni was an Italian socialist politician, the national secretary of the Italian Socialist Party and lifetime Senator since 1970. He was a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951...

. But he was too powerful to be allowed to be the Prime Minister of the first such government which actually included the Socialists in the coalition of the 1963 government that was headed by Aldo Moro
Aldo Moro
Aldo Moro was an Italian politician and the 39th Prime Minister of Italy, from 1963 to 1968, and then from 1974 to 1976. He was one of Italy's longest-serving post-war Prime Ministers, holding power for a combined total of more than six years....

.

Losing his grip

He failed to become president of the Republic in 1964, and for much of the 1960s he was forced in the background. A strong supporter of the European Economic Community
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...

 (EEC), Fanfani was foreign minister in 1965 and in 1966-68. He also served (1965–66) as president of the United Nations General Assembly
United Nations General Assembly
For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...

 - he is the only Italian to have held this office. In 1971 he was again his party's candidate for the presidency, but in the secret ballot a sizeable number of his own party colleagues failed to support him. As a consolation, he was made Senator for life
Senator for life
A senator for life is a member of the senate or equivalent upper chamber of a legislature who has life tenure. , 7 Italian Senators out of 322, 4 out of the 47 Burundian Senators and all members of the British House of Lords have lifetime tenure...

 in 1972.

He was President of the Senate from 1968 to 1973. Fanfani became secretary of the Christian Democrats for a second time in 1973. As such, he led the campaign for the referendum on repealing the law allowing divorce, which he fought in typically combative style, alienating the pro-divorce groups unnecessarily, without achieving the victory that would have given him predominance in his own party.

The defeat of the divorce referendum provoked his resignation as party secretary in 1975. He had to content himself with the status of President of the Senate, formally the second office of the state. In the later part of his career his aspiration was to be elected President of the Republic, but notwithstanding the formal party nomination he never secured the sufficient support in the electoral college.

From 1982 to 1983, Fanfani was Prime Minister for the fifth time. From 1985 to 1987, he was President of the Senate again. From April to July 1987, he was Prime Minister for the sixth time. Fanfani was elected to the prestigious post of chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate from 1994-1996.

Fanfani died in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 on 20 November, 1999. He saw the corporate state as the ideal, and in what he calls a "temporary aberration" turned to Fascism. He has never tried to hide his Fascist record; but unlike many of his countrymen, he freely admits that he was wrong. He held all positions and offices a politician could possibly aspire to, except the one he craved most: president of the Republic. The factionalism of the DC turned out to be the biggest obstacle to the emergence of Fanfanismo, the pale Italian version of Gaullism
Gaullism
Gaullism is a French political ideology based on the thought and action of Resistance leader then president Charles de Gaulle.-Foreign policy:...

, and one by one he lost his offices.

Further reading

  • Giulio Andreotti
    Giulio Andreotti
    Giulio Andreotti is an Italian politician of the now dissolved centrist Christian Democracy party. He served as the 42nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1972 to 1973, from 1976 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1992. He also served as Minister of the Interior , Defense Minister and Foreign Minister and he...

    , De Gasperi e il suo tempo, Milan, Mondadori, 1956.
  • Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, reprint, Norfolk: IHS Press, 2003.
  • Nico Perrone
    Nico Perrone
    Nico Perrone is an Italian essayist, historian and journalist. He firstly discovered papers on the plot for killing Enrico Mattei, the Italian state tycoon for oil in the 1950s....

    , Il segno della DC, Bari, Dedalo, 2002, ISBN 88-220-6253-1.
  • Luciano Radi, La Dc da De Gasperi a Fanfani, Soveria Manelli, Rubbettino, 2005.

External links

Fondazione Amintore Fanfani
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