Antipartito. Opposition to the political class and the party system in 1970’s Italy

From the early years of the Republic, the central role played by political parties in Italy’s post-World War II democracy was offset by a widespread sentiment of hostility towards professional politicians that had arisen in broad swaths of civil society due to fear of excessive power in the hands of political elites in State institutions. This sentiment, further nurtured in subsequent decades by the troubles associated with Cold War democrazia bloccata (‘blocked democracy’), reached a decisive turning point in the 1970s. During that period, under the pressure of world economic crisis and post-1968 extremism and terrorism, rejection of partitocrazia (‘party rule’) across the ideological divide became a pervasive phenomenon, marked by such emblematic events as the vote in the 1978 referendum on public funding for political parties, the resignation of then President of the Republic Giovanni Leone, and the election in his place of Sandro Pertini: the first key political figure, in Italian democracy, to present himself as an ‘ordinary man’ rather than a member of the elite.