Italian Socialist Party
이탈리아 사회당
Italian socialist party founded in Genoa in 1892 as the Party of Italian Workers and named Italian Socialist Party from 1895. It became the largest party in the 1919 election but was broken by the Communist split of 1921 and the rise of fascism, and was banned in 1926. After the war it joined coalition governments, Bettino Craxi was prime minister from 1983 to 1987, and it was dissolved in 1994 after the Tangentopoli corruption scandals.
In depth
The party was formed on 14 August 1892 by several workers' organisations, including the Italian Workers' Party (founded in Milan in 1882) and Filippo Turati's Milanese Socialist League, and was modelled on the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It became the Socialist Party of Italian Workers at the Reggio Emilia congress of 1893 and the Italian Socialist Party at the Parma congress of 1895. Within it Turati's Reformists faced the Maximalists. At the Reggio Emilia congress of 1912 the Maximalists won and expelled the right-wing reformists Bissolati and Bonomi, on a motion moved by Benito Mussolini.
The party stayed neutral in the First World War. Mussolini, editor of the party paper Avanti!, resigned in October 1914 after calling for 'active neutrality', founded Il Popolo d'Italia and was expelled on 29 November. At its 1919 congress in Bologna the party voted to join the Communist International, and in the election that year it won its best result ever, 32.0% and 156 seats. At the Livorno congress of 1921 Giacinto Menotti Serrati's Unitary Maximalists won 89,028 votes, the Communists of Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci 58,783 and Turati's Reformists 14,695; the Communists broke away to found the Communist Party of Italy. In October 1922 the reformists of Turati and Giacomo Matteotti were expelled and formed the Unitary Socialist Party.
After Matteotti was murdered by Fascists in 1924, the regime suppressed all opposition parties, the PSI included, in 1925–1926, and the leadership went into exile in Paris and elsewhere. After the fall of fascism in 1943 the party joined the Resistance, and in the 1946 election it narrowly led the Communists with 20.7% to 18.9%. Giuseppe Saragat's right wing split away in 1947, and the party under Pietro Nenni stayed allied with the Communists until the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. From 1963 it joined centre-left coalition governments with Christian Democracy, and Craxi, secretary from 1976, was the first Socialist prime minister of the Republic in 1983–1987. Badly hit by the Tangentopoli investigations of the early 1990s, it won only 2.5% in the 1994 election and was put into liquidation the same year.