From Enemy to Opponent: The Politics of Delegitimation in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (1945-1992)

This article reconstructs the dynamics of delegitimation of political opponents in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), which had a relative majority and almost uninterruptedly led Italy’s governments from 1945 to 1992. The DC built its strategy of delegitimation on two levels, an ideological-religious one and a systemic one, which were only partly interdependent and overlapping. In almost half a century, the DC aimed its rhetoric and politics of delegitimation mainly at those opposition parties it considered as anti-establishment, that is, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), and the form of delegitimation changed a great deal over this period. However, it is possible to grasp a specific dynamic: from a rigid form of delegitimation, from time to time it became possible to legitimate (at least in part) the opposition parties at different times and in different ways, depending on the changes in the political sphere and in society. It was a process full of contradictions and ambiguities within which the political enemy gradually gave way to becoming a political opponent.