Italian Liberal Party
|
Italian Liberal Party
Partito Liberale Italiano |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Leaders |
Giovanni Giolitti Luigi Facta Benedetto Croce Luigi Einaudi Enrico De Nicola Bruno Villabruna Gaetano Martino Giovanni Malagodi Valerio Zanone Alfredo Biondi Renato Altissimo Raffaele Costa |
| Founded | 8 October 1922 |
| Dissolved | 6 February 1994 |
| Preceded by | Liberal Union |
| Succeeded by |
Federation of Liberals Union of the Centre |
| Newspaper | L'Opinione |
| Membership (1958) | 173,722 (max) |
| Ideology |
Liberalism Liberism Conservatism |
| Political position | Centre-right |
| National affiliation |
National Blocs (1922–24) National List (1924–26) National Democratic Union (1946–48) National Bloc (1948) Centrism (1948–58) Pentapartito(1980–93) |
| European affiliation | ELDR Party |
| International affiliation | Liberal International |
| European Parliament group | ELDR Group |
| Colours |
Green, white, red (Italian tricolour) Blue (customary) |
The Italian Liberal Party (Italian: Partito Liberale Italiano, PLI) was a liberal and conservative political party in Italy.
The origins of liberalism in Italy are in the Historical Right, a parliamentary group formed by Camillo Benso di Cavour in the Parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia following the 1848 revolution. The group was moderately conservative and supported centralised government, restricted suffrage, regressive taxation, and free trade. They dominated politics following Italian unification in 1861 but never formed a party, basing their power on census suffrage and first-past-the-post voting system.
The Right was opposed by the more progressive Historical Left, which overthrew Marco Minghetti's government during the so-called "Parliamentary Revolution" of 1876, which brought Agostino Depretis to become Prime Minister. However, Depretis immediately began to look for support among Rightists MPs, who readily changed their positions, in a context of widespread corruption. This phenomenon, known in Italian as trasformismo (roughly translatable in English as "transformism"—in a satirical newspaper, the PM was depicted as a chameleon), effectively removed political differences in Parliament, which was dominated by an undistinguished liberal bloc with a landslide majority until after World War I. Two parliamentary factions alternated in government, one led by Sidney Sonnino and the other, by far the largest of the two, by Giovanni Giolitti. At that time the Liberals governed in alliance with the Radicals, the Democrats and, eventually, the Reform Socialists.
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