ITALIAN SOCIALIST PARTY

Italian Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) one of the first Italian parties with a national scope and a modern democratic organization. It was founded in 1892 in Genoa as the Italian Workers' Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani) and took its present name in 1893. The original basis of the party lay among trade unions, socialist circles, and cooperative organizations and contained an anarchist wing and a Marxist wing. Throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the party's left wing (or maximalists) fought for control against its reformists (led by Filippo Turati). One maximalist leader was Benito Mussolini, but he was expelled in 1914 because he favoured Italy's entrance into World War I. During that war the PSI took a neutral and pacifist position, yet within the party, intense struggle continued between the factions. In 1919 at the Bologna Congress the left took leadership of the party, joined the Communist International (Comintern), and attempted revolutionary upheaval. After an enormous wave of strikes, demonstrations, and factory occupations in 1920, a reaction set in. While the majority of the party retreated, the left broke away to join the Italian Communist Party. The PSI was driven underground in 1926, and in 1934 it formed an alliance with the Communists that lasted until the mid-1950s, when the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech led the PSI to denounce the Soviet Union. The party remained torn over the question of whether to collaborate with the Christian Democrats or the Communists. After much hesitation the party joined a Christian Democratic government in 1963. Thereafter the PSI was part of or supported many centre-left governments, and in 1983 Bettino Craxi became the first Socialist premier. His first government (198386) lasted longer than any other since World War II. A second coalition government (198687) was less successful. The PSI continued as a major partner in centrist coalition governments until the early 1990s, when Craxi and numerous other party figures were implicated in financial scandals and political corruption. In the 1994 elections, the PSI lost most of its seats in Parliament and was reduced to a relatively minor party.