Italian Socialist Party

A split with what became known as the Communist Party of Italy and the rise to power of former party member and Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who was expelled from the party and repudiated socialism, class struggle and internationalism in favour of corporatism and ultranationalism, and his National Fascist Party led to the PSI's collapse in the controversial 1924 Italian general election and eventual ban in 1925. This led the party and its remaining leaders to the underground or in exile.^[4] The PSI dominated the Italian left until after World War II, when it was eclipsed in status by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The two parties formed an alliance lasting until 1956 and governed together at the local level, particularly in some big cities and the so-called red regions until the 1990s. The PSI suffered the right-wing split of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party, whose members opposed the alliance with the PCI and favoured joining the Centrism coalition, in 1947 and the left-wing split of the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, whose members wanted to continue the cooperation with the PCI, in 1964. Starting from the 1960s, the PSI frequently participated in coalition governments led by Christian Democracy, from the Organic centre-left to the Pentapartito in the 1980s.^[4]


The PSI, which always remained the country's third-largest party, came to special prominence in the 1980s when its leader Bettino Craxi served as Prime Minister of Italy from 1983 to 1987.^[4] Under Craxi, the PSI severed the residual ties with Marxism and dropped the hammer and sickle in favour of a carnation, a symbol popularly associated with democratic socialism and social democracy, which the party was by then fully embracing, and re-branded it as liberal-socialist^[5][6]—some observers compared this to the Third Way developments of social democracy and described these events as being twenty years ahead of New Labour in the United Kingdom.^[7] By that time, the party was aligned with European social democracy and like-minded reformist socialist parties and leaders, including François Mitterrand, Felipe González, Andreas Papandreou and Mário Soares, and was one of the main representatives of Mediterranean or South European socialism.^[8][9] During this period, Italy underwent il sorpasso and became the world's sixth largest economy but also saw a rise of its public debt. While associated with neoliberal policies, as the post-war consensus around social democracy was on the defensive amid the crisis of the 1970s, others argue that the PSI and Craxi, along with the DC's left-wing when they governed, maintained dirigisme in contrast to the neoliberal and privatisation trends.^[10]


The PSI was disbanded in 1994 as a result of the Tangentopoli scandals.^[11] A series of legal successors followed, including the Italian Socialists (1994–1998),^[12] the Italian Democratic Socialists (1998–2007) and the Socialist Party (formed in 2007, it took the PSI name in October 2009) within the centre-left coalition,^[4] and a string of minor parties and the New Italian Socialist Party (formed in 2001) within the centre-right coalition.^[4] These parties have never reached the popularity of the old PSI. Former PSI leading members and voters have joined quite different parties, from the centre-right, such as Forza Italia, The People of Freedom and the new Forza Italia, to the centre-left, such as the Democratic Party.^[13]

When Socialists came out in the late 1890s, they were present only in rural Emilia-Romagna and southern Lombardy, where they won their first seats of the Chamber of Deputies; they soon enlarged their base in other areas of the country, especially the urban areas around Turin, Milan, Genoa, and to some extent Naples, densely populated by industrial workers. In the 1900 Italian general election, the party won 5.0% of the vote and 33 seats, its best result so far. Emilia-Romagna was confirmed as the Socialist heartland (20.2% and 13 seats), and the party also did well in Lombardy and Piedmont.^[24]


By the end of the 1910s, Socialists had broadened their organisation to all the regions of Italy but were stronger in Northern Italy, where they emerged earlier and where they had their constituency. In the 1919 Italian general election, thanks to the electoral reforms of the previous decade and especially the introduction of proportional representation in place of the old first-past-the-post system, they had their best result ever: 32.0% and 156 seats. The PSI was at the time the representative of both the rural workers of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and north-western Piedmont and the industrial workers of Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, and Florence. In 1919, the party won 49.7% in Piedmont (over 60% in Novara), 45.9% in Lombardy (over 60% in Mantua and Pavia), 60.0% in Emilia-Romagna (over 70% around Bologna and Ferrara), 41.7% in Tuscany, and 46.5% in Umbria.^[24]


In the 1921 Italian general election and after the split of the Communist Party of Italy, the PSI was reduced to 24.5% and was particularly damaged in Piedmont and Tuscany, where Communists got more than 10% of the vote.^[24] During the Italian Resistance, which was fought mostly in Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, and Central Italy, Communists were able to take roots and organise people much better than Socialists so that at the end of World War II the balance between the two parties was completely changed. In the 1946 Italian general election, the PSI was narrowly ahead of Communists (20.7% over 18.7%) but was no longer the dominant party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany.^[25]


In the 1948 Italian general election, Socialists took part to the Popular Democratic Front with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) but lost almost half of their seats in the Chamber of Deputies due to the better get-out-the-vote machine of Communists and the split of the social-democratic faction from the party, the Italian Workers' Socialist Party (7.1%, with peaks over 10% in the Socialist strongholds of the North). In the 1953 Italian general election, the PSI was reduced to 12.7% of the vote and to its heartlands above the Po River, having gained more votes than Communists only narrowly in Lombardy and Veneto. The margin between the two parties would have become larger and larger until its peak in the 1976 Italian general election, when the PCI won 34.4% of the vote and the PSI stopped at 9.6%. At that time, Communists had almost five times the vote of Socialists in the PSI's ancient heartlands of rural Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and three times in the Northern regions, where the PSI had some local strongholds left such as in north-eastern Piedmont, north-western and southern Lombardy, north-eastern Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where it gained steadily 12–20% of the vote.^[24][26]


Under the leadership of Bettino Craxi in the 1980s, the PSI had a substantial increase in term of votes. The party strengthened its position in Lombardy, north-eastern Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and broadened its power base to Southern Italy, as all the other parties of Pentapartito coalition (Christian Democracy, Italian Republican Party, Italian Democratic Socialist Party, and the Italian Liberal Party) were experiencing. In the 1987 Italian general election, the PSI gained 14.3% of the vote, which was below expectations after four years of government led by Craxi. Alongside the high shares of vote in north-western Lombardy and the North-East (both around 18–20%), the PSI did fairly well in Campania (14.9%), Apulia (15.3%), Calabria (16.9%), and Sicily (14.9%). In the 1992 Italian general election, this trend toward the South was even more evident, and is also reflected in the PSI's main successors, the Italian Socialists, the Italian Democratic Socialists, the New Italian Socialist Party, and the modern-day Italian Socialist Party, all of which had always been stronger in those Southern regions. While Socialists, like Communists and Christian Democrats, had lost votes to Lega Nord, especially in Lombardy, they gained in the South, reaching 19.6% of the vote in Campania, 17.8% in Apulia, and 17.2% in Calabria.^[24][26]


The electoral results of the PSI in general (Chamber of Deputies) and European Parliament elections since 1895 are shown in the chart above.

The PSI was rather unusual among mainstream socialist parties in Europe in using the hammer and sickle as its symbol. In the early 1970s, this prevented it from obtaining the right to use the fist and rose created by France's Socialist Party and shared with several other European parties; it was used in Italy by the Radical Party, although it was ideologically different.^[27][28] The symbolism of the party was gradually moderated. In 1978, Craxi decided to change the party logo of the party. He chose a red carnation to represent the new course of the party, in honour of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. The party shrank the size of the old hammer and sickle in the lower part of the symbol. It was eventually eliminated altogether in 1987.