Liberals (Italy)
|
Liberal Union
Unione Liberale |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Leader | Giovanni Giolitti |
| Other leaders |
Sidney Sonnino, Antonio Salandra, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Luigi Facta |
| Founded | 1913 |
| Dissolved | 1922 |
| Merger of |
Historical Left Historical Right |
| Succeeded by | Italian Liberal Party |
| Headquarters | Rome |
| Ideology |
Liberalism Centrism Social conservatism |
| Political position | Centre-right |
The Liberal Union (Italian: Unione Liberale), simply and collectively called Liberals (Italian: Liberali), was a political alliance formed in the first years of the 20th century by the Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Historical Left, Giovanni Giolitti.
The alliance was formed when the Left and the Right merged in a single centrist and Liberal coalition which largely dominated the Italian Parliament.
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. This alliance governed against two smaller opposition: The Clericals, composed by some Vatican-oriented politicians, The Extreme, formed by the socialist faction which represented a real left in a present-day concept.
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