Politics
Socialism loses another old star
Published 07 August 2000
John Lloydmourns the passing of L'Unita, the organ of Italy's far left
The village of Alberese, in the midst of the district of Maremma in the south of Tuscany, held its annual Festa dell' Unita, or Festival of the Communist Party, all last week. It was, on the evidence of one night's visit, well attended: the descendants of Mussolini's smallholders vote left.
An electronic pianola played waltzes and some elderly couples danced in the sports field, open to the hot, soft night. Children ran shrieking near the marquee where about 200 people sat down to sausages, pasta, the local wine. Five cooks in white caps, like American sailors, sweated over hot stoves behind the marquee. A party flag - of the Democrats of the Left (PDS), the former Communist Party of Italy - drooped beneath the green, white and red tricolour. You marvelled at the sheer vitality of the local organisation.
And yet the party's daily organ, L'Unita, does not exist any more - not in the form that it has since it was founded, in February 1924, by Antonio Gramsci in Milan (with a break for the fascist period, during which Gramsci, the founder and genius of the Italian Communist Party, died in prison). L'Unita disappeared from the news-stands after its last issue on 27 July - leaving, as Michele Serra wrote in La Repubblica, "a hole in Italian political culture the size of a capital 'U'".
The reason why was spelt out in that last issue by Walter Veltroni, the general secretary of the PDS (the largest force in the Olive Tree governing coalition), himself a former editor of L'Unita. Responding to the departing editor's open letter blaming the party leadership for the paper's closure, Veltroni revealed that the paper was costing 2.5bn lire (£800,000) a month to keep going. "This is not sustainable," he wrote, "for an honest party that doesn't steal . . . we have spent a large part of the party's savings, and have gone to the lengths of not paying staff at party headquarters in order to keep the paper alive."
The end was very bitter. At the press conference in the paper's Rome offices, Massimo d'Alema, the former party general secretary and prime minister of Italy for 18 months until spring this year, sat, uncomfortably, next to senior staff of the paper. Charged with insouciance, d'Alema said that, since resigning as premier and party leader, he had had no official role in the PDS and "I would not allow myself the easy demagogy of solidarity". It did not go down well. Maddalena Tulanti, one of the paper's editors, shouted: "Massimo, you haven't been near us for many years. I think you've been mistaken about everything."
The 200 journalists and printers are insisting on at least an afterlife. They are occupying the offices, and putting out an internet version on www.unita.it - which is getting 500,000 hits a day - ten times the circulation of the paper, which had shrunk to a miserable 50,000 a day.
The leadership of the PDS has embarked on a fundraising drive - but the results are still meagre. On the day of its closure, L'Unita printed a list of individuals and organisations that had already pledged support - the total was well short of one day's running costs. The refusal of the paper's staff to believe in its death is, however, wholly understandable. This had been the most successful paper of the far left in the non-communist world: it achieved more than a million sales on Sundays during the Seventies and on the 1 May labour holiday.
The writers Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino edited its culture section, or "third page". It was the paper of the building site, the truck cab, the teachers' staffroom and the university common room. It had correspondents all over Italy and all over the world. If it never could escape the tutelage of the party to which it belonged, it was able to benefit from that party's openness and from being the leader of a Eurocommunist current that reshaped Europe's left - including new Labour.
The paper had tried hard to modernise: in the Eighties,Veltroni redesigned it, gave more space to the arts and culture and gave away videos and CDs. But the industrialists and financiers who own the main Italian dailies have much deeper pockets and, in La Repubblica, Italy has one of the best papers of the centre-left in the world.
L'Unita was begun as, and has remained, a militants' paper. People interviewed about it on television, now leaning on sticks, remember racing up and down the stairs in the raw apartment blocks of postwar Italy to deliver the precious word from the party to the proletariat. But, as one who was still delivering to the end remarked, "now they won't even lose five minutes of TV to talk about politics on the door".
Leaving Alberese's festa and wandering to the centre of the little village, you come across the glass-covered noticeboards you find in most Ita-lian small towns. One is for L'Unita. Inside is a yellowing front page from May 1997, showing a grinning Tony Blair with Cherie Booth entering Downing Street.
But it is the front page of La Repubblica.
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