The merger of the Nationalist Association with the PNF in March 1923 was part of Fascism’s absorption of pro-Fascist groups which were initially either independent organisations or belonged to other political parties and groupings. This process of co-option culminated in the formation of the listone for the 1924 elections. The recruitment of the Nationalists helped Fascism to extend its political control to the
south and the islands. The price it had to pay was the sacrifice of the PNF’s radical pretensions in the area to the ‘transformistic’ and clien-telistic politics of the south.
The rider to the fusion with the Nationalists was the dismissal in May 1923 of Aurelio Padovani, the PNF leader in Naples and zonal MVSN commander, whose ‘intransigent’ republican and anti-clientelistic Fascism was the model for a string of young party bosses throughout Campania. This kind of southern Fascism resembled that of the north-ern fasci of 1919, both in its ex-junior army officer and university stu-dent base, and its lack of political weight. Padovani and some of his acolytes in Campania had built up a relatively combative party and union organisation. But in most southern fasci, where they existed at all before October 1922, the few young men who saw Fascism as the new ex-combatant élite regenerating a corrupt politics and society had locked the PNF into self-perpetuating political isolation.
Southern politics revolved around personality and municipality:
control of the local council was the source of favours which kept the electors sweet; who you were and what your connections were mat-tered above all in the murky exchange of patronage for votes which passed as political activity. The youthful parvenus running the fasci were nobodies who promised nothing. They remained so, while they continued in their well-meaning but naïve crusade against the old men and the old ways to exclude from the PNF the local worthies and their factional followings. So in Campania, as a reaction to and refuge from Padovanian ‘intransigence’ in the PNF, the dominant local clienteles drew closer to the Nationalists. They expanded in many other parts of the south following the ‘March on Rome’, as the usual factional infighting over municipal power took on the appropriate political labels of the time.
An Interior Ministry report on the Basilicata in early 1923 spoke volumes for the shallow and opportunistic roots of Fascism in many Southern regions: ‘Where there is a mayor, a communal administration supported by the old clienteles, camouflaged as Nationalists, there arises Fascism, or better, the other opposition clienteles dress themselves as Fascists and the Fascist section is created.’5
The en bloc entry of the Nationalists into the PNF made a partner out of a rival in the south and inserted their clienteles within the party.
Fascism co-opted the southern liberal politicians and their local and regional followings in the same way, using the fact that it was now the party of central government to overcome the PNF’s absence or weakness on the ground before October 1922. Liberals in the south were government
supporters before they were liberals, because what interested them was access to the patronage and resources of the state. It was no wonder that Mussolini in his coalition government continued the liberal government tradition of appointing prominent southern politicians to head the Ministries of Posts and Telegraphs, and Public Works, which payrolled thousands of real and phantom jobs in the south.
All that was needed was to convince the local notables who delivered the votes that the PNF now represented the best line of connection to central government. The prefects of the southern provinces worked hard to make Fascism known and accepted locally. They made use of the time-honoured levers of prefectural interference in provincial affairs on behalf of the central government, control over public spending and public sector employment and the power to dissolve municipal councils, to cajole and co-opt the local men of substance into the party. In places like Avellino and Benevento, the prefect was the architect and arbiter of the provincial PNF. The ‘ministerialism’ of southern politics also worked against those few prominent liberal leaders – Nitti in the Basilicata and Giovanni Amendola in Salerno – who resisted co-option by Fascism and became a kind of ‘constitutional opposition’ before, during and after the 1924 elections. As the ‘outs’ of local and national politics, they had no channel to the government favours and funds previously sustaining their own clientelistic followings, which were steadily ‘trans-formed’ into backers of the government party.
The formation of the listone was the other way of making the PNF the indispensable conduit of political influence in the south. In line with the kind of co-operation first offered in the ‘bivouac’ speech and reiter-ated in Mussolini’s speech of January 1924 after the dissolution of parliament for the forthcoming elections, the listone was put together on the basis of ‘men, not parties’. Since the Acerbo law weighted the allocation of seats so much, the sure way of being elected was to be included in the government list of candidates. This inducement was enough for southern politicians and outgoing deputies to join the PNF. Once the major personalities of the southern liberal parliamentary grouping were on the listone, their followers and factions came too.
The listone then marked the absorption into Fascism of its ‘flankers’
among rightist and southern liberals, Nationalists, conservative Popolari and others. The process had gone furthest in the south: whereas about a quarter of candidates on the listone in Venetia, Emilia and Tuscany were
‘flankers’, 60 per cent of government candidates in Sicily were liberals.
The election results reflected the vote-gathering rewards of southern
trasformismo. The listone nationally won nearly 65 per cent of the vote and 374 seats, but did not have a majority over the other electoral lists in Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy and Venetia. It gained majorities in the heartlands of squadrist Fascism, Emilia and Tuscany, where particu-larly in rural districts the squads had ensured the vote – 100 per cent for the listone in some areas of Ferrara; and in the south and the islands, 68 per cent of votes cast in Sicily going to the listone, including blocs of votes delivered by liberals whom the ‘intransigent’ party leader in Palermo, Alfredo Cucco, had previously excluded from the PNF as mafiosi.
Of the 374 elected, about 60 per cent were Fascists; the rest were the
‘fellow travellers’ now adopting the Fascist label.
This pattern of results would not have been out of place in pre-war Giolittian Italy, where the bank of government supporters in parliament were southern liberals. The 1924 elections could be seen as the culmin-ation of a vast exercise in trasformismo, with Mussolini as ‘super-transformer’. It might appear that Fascism was the victim as much as the beneficiary of trasformismo. This was especially so in Sicily where the PNF was sucked into the world of clientelism in 1924 and never re-emerged.
The central party leadership was alternately bemused and exasperated by their inability to make sense of and affect the island’s personalised and parish-pump politics. More generally, Mussolini’s government had given southern Fascism a conservative cast as a result of its basic decision to ditch Padovani and his anti-clientelistic party and syndicates. By accepting rather than challenging the usual southern mode of politics and co-opting its practitioners, Fascism had preserved the traditional land-holding system behind clientelism. Fascism’s conquest of the south appeared to mean the south’s conquest of Fascism, with Mussolini basically renewing the Giolittian deal whereby the south’s political representatives supported the government in return for government’s non-interference in the region’s socio-economic structures.
But Mussolini’s trasformismo was different because it was permanent.
Co-operation on the basis of ‘men, not parties’ aimed at the disaggregation or disintegration of existing non-Fascist parties; the Fascist ‘normality’
was for there to be no other parties, no position independent of Fascism.
In the 1924 elections the parties remaining as independent political for-mations were the two Socialist parties, the Communists, the Republicans, the PPI and the southern liberal opposition of Amendola and Nitti.
They had to stand outside the listone and accept inevitable political defeat, competing only for a third of parliamentary seats. Even the non-oppositional ‘flanker’ lists, like the Giolittian liberals in Piedmont,
were in the same position as Fascism’s declared political opponents because they insisted on standing separately and did not join their fellow liberals in the listone. The ‘flankers’ in the listone had lost their political independence; they ran as Fascists and not as liberal allies of Fascism.
They were not members of an electoral coalition, like the one the Fascists had themselves joined in 1921, but incorporated into a one-party bloc.
In this light, the practice of the Fascist Party and government, the creation of Fascist institutions which operated alongside and against the existing framework of parliamentary democracy, and electoral reform, indicated that what Mussolini and Fascism were aiming at between 1922 and 1924 was a gradual change to a more authoritarian political order, where the PNF would effectively monopolise political power. It was not yet formally a one-party state or dictatorship, at least in a legal and institutional sense. But the situation was approaching that in fact, and it was certainly not ‘normalisation’.