Comment by pastProlog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pastProlog | Hacker News Reader

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> All this complicated dance of indirect elections (that the current parties would like to remove) has been put in place after the WW2 to avoid too much power being in the hands of these high-profile figures or of a single party.

All of this was put in place after World War II to centralize power in the hands of the Christian Democrats, and force non-communist parties to go into coalition with them. As all prime ministers for a half century after WWII were either Christian Democrats or from those parties in coalition with them, it worked fairly well. Of course even this had bumps in the road so you have the 1948 elections which the communist/socialist coalition won but which was fixed the other way, a strategy of tension by P2 and the far right being blamed on the far left as the left makes electoral and other advances in the 1970s, plus you have Gladio and secret NATO armies in the wings in case the communists are actually elected into power. Of course being Italian, you know all of this.

"All of this was put in place after World War II to centralize power in the hands of the Christian Democrats, and force non-communist parties to go into coalition with them."

And yet this system allowed liberal reforms, like divorce and abortion, to be carried our during a center-right party rule, and Italy to become (at the time) the 7th most advanced economy.

Even the clause in the constitution that declared Chatolicism as the country's official religion was amended during CD rule.

It is (was) an imperfect system and it created a lot of instability, since even a party with a low share of votes could throw down the coalition government at any moment, but at least it forced parties to go beyond ideologies and work out compromises. The lack of alternance in power also fostered corruption, which was the downfall of CD.

Still, it's hard to consider what came after as a marked improvement for the country.

As much as I share the overall reading of XX century Italian history you propose, it does not support a causal theory between the Constitution and what followed. The Italian Communist Party was one of three dominant forces shaping the Constitution (the other two being Socialists and Christian-Democrats); they were as interested in avoiding centralization as anyone else, in order to keep Fascist nostalgia at bay. Most Communists in the Assembly had been freedom fighters, some of them for decades, at huge personal cost; their priority was to avoid a new Mussolini ever appearing.

Once the Constitution was in place, overall political debate was indeed shaped by Cold War events and influences; but the document itself is arguably a pinnacle achievement of political theory, pushing representative democracy and collective responsibility to their limits.

> you have the 1948 elections which the communist/socialist coalition won but which was fixed the other way

The left-wing coalition (which was actually missing a piece of the socialists) didn't even get close to winning. It got 31% of the vote.

In East Germany in 1949, you had a left coalition like in the 1948 Italian election. It gained 66% of the vote to the 34% of the opposition. In the 1947 Hungarian election, the communists got the most votes.

So how come we never hear that Eastern Europe became communist democratically? After all, they can point to election numbers as you do. Well, the Red Army occupied them some say. But the US armed forces occupied Italy - they still do. Well, the USSR, a foreign power meddled in the elections. The US and CIA admit how massively they meddled in Italy's 1948 (and subsequent) elections.

I can easily say that the non-communist and non-communist aligned parties in Eastern Europe "didn't even come close to winning" after World War II and the people of those countries democratically decided to become communist. After all, Hungary became communist after World War I without Russian intervention, a fact few in the West remember.

It's odd to see the US and CIA admitting after decades they interfered in and fixed the Italian 1948 elections, yet you still hold up the phony results, yet everyone can easily discount the elections in eastern Europe after World War II, where Russia simply did the same thing the US did.

The main difference is that the US backed governments mostly didn't end up being horribly repressive, requiring military intervention to keep in power, and eventually overthrown.

In any case, an argument that Eastern Europe's Communist governments were illegitimate cannot be countered by saying that Western Europe's governments were illegitimate, no matter how true that may be.

The US did not "fix" the elections. They did finance the DC campaign, just as the Soviet Union financed the FDP campaign.

In the preceding 1946 elections, the Communists got 19% and the Socialists got 20%, for a total of 39%.

In the 1948 elections, FDP (Communists + part of Socialists) got 31%, while the rest of the Socialists (including the man who was the leader of the Socialists in the previous elections) got 7%, for a total of 38%.

In the following 1953 elections, the Communists got 23%, the Socialists (who broke out of the failed FDP alliance) got 13%, for a total of 36%.

So we have 39% -> 38% -> 36%. You are arguing that the expected mid-point of that series would have been 51%, had it not been for the US fixing the elections. That is a Reptilian-level conspiracy theory.

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