Wednesday, July 8, 2015
S2 (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
The political party Fronte dell’Uomo Qualunque which existed between 1944 and 1948 has always retained a certain mystery in Italian political history. Although it set the tone for decades of accusations of ‘qualunquismo’ in Italian politics, the movement itself has been hard to characterize. Usually it is understood as a movement that epitomised a refusal to come to terms with the fascist past in Southern Italy. This paper studies the movement beyond the fascist/anti-fascist divide and investigates how it attempted to gain democratic legitimacy in an age of quick political transition. It posits that the movement was more than mere an ‘anti-movement’ and had its own distinct view on politics. Based upon a study of the party’s newspaper, it demonstrates how the movement cleverly played on the discourse of democracy and even used this concept to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the anti-fascist government coalition. It concludes by discussing the various perspectives from which the movement can be explained and situated in Italian history and demonstrates how the movement's ideology can enlighten the anti-political sentiments in Italy over the past two decades.
