Italian Socialist Party - Popular Support

Popular Support

When the Socialists came out in the late 1890s, they were present only in rural Emilia-Romagna and southern Lombardy, where they won their first seats of the Chamber of Deputies, but they soon enlarged their base in other areas of the country, especially the urban areas around Turin, Milan, Genoa and, to some extent, Naples, densely populated by industrial workers. In the 1900 general election the party won 5.0% of the vote and 33 seats, its best result so far. Emilia-Romagna was confirmed as the Socialist heartland (20.2% and 13 seats), but the party did very well also in Piedmont and Lombardy.

By the end of the 1910s, the Socialists had broadened their organization to all the regions of Italy, but they were obviously stronger in the North, where they emerged earlier and where they had their constituency. In the 1919 general election, thanks to the electoral reforms of the previous decade and especially the introduction of proportional representation in place of the old first-past-the-post system, they had their best result ever: 32.0% and 156 seats. The PSI was at the time the representative of both the rural workers of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and north-western Piedmont and the industrial workers of Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna and Florence. In 1919 the party won 49.7% in Piedmont (over 60% in Novara), 45.9% in Lombardy (over 60% in Mantua and Pavia), 60.0% in Emilia-Romagna (over 70% around Bologna and Ferrara), 41.7% in Tuscany and 46.5% in Umbria.

In the 1921 general election, after the split of the Communist Party of Italy, the PSI was reduced to 24.5% and was particularly damaged in Piedmont and Tuscany, where the Communists got more than 10% of the vote. During the Italian Resistance, which was fought mostly in Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Central Italy, the Communists were able to take roots and organize people much better than the Socialists so that at the end of World War II the balance between the two parties was completely changed. In the 1946 general election the PSI was narrowly ahead of the Communists (20.7% over 18.7%), but was no longer the dominant party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany.

In the 1948 general election the Socialists took part to the Popular Democratic Front with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), but they lost almost half of their seats in the Chamber of Deputies, due to the better get-out-the-vote machine of the Communists and the split of the social-democratic faction from the party, the Italian Workers' Socialist Party (7.1%, with peaks over 10% in the Socialist strongholds of the North). In 1953 the PSI was reduced to 12.7% of the vote and to its heartlands above the Po River, having gained more votes than the Communists only narrowly in Lombardy and Veneto. The margin between the two parties would have become larger and larger until its peak in 1976, when the PCI won 34.4% of the vote and the PSI stopped at 9.6%. At that time the Communists had almost five times the vote of the Socialists in the PSI's ancient heartlands of rural Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany and three times in the Northern regions, where the PSI had some local strongholds left such as in north-eastern Piedmont, north-western and southern Lombardy, north-eastern Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where it gained steadily 12-20% of the vote.

Under the leadership of Bettino Craxi in the 1980s, the PSI had a substantial increase in term of votes. The party strengthened its position in Lombardy, north-eastern Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and broadened its power base to Southern Italy, as all the other parties of Pentapartito coalition (Christian Democrats, Republicans, Democratic Socialists and Liberals) were experiencing. In the 1987 general election the PSI gained 14.3% of the vote, a good result but below expectations after four years of government led by Craxi. Alongside the high shares of vote in north-western Lombardy and the North-East (both around 18-20%), the PSI did fairly well in Campania (14.9%), Apulia (15.3%), Calabria (16.9%) and Sicily (14.9%). In 1992 this trend toward the South was even more evident: while the Socialists, like the Communists and the Christian Democrats, had lost votes to Lega Nord especially in Lombardy, they gained in the South, reaching 19.6% of the vote in Campania, 17.8% in Apulia and 17.2% in Calabria. This is why the PSI's main successors, the Italian Socialists, the Italian Democratic Socialists, the New Italian Socialist Party and the modern-day Italian Socialist Party, had always been stronger in those Southern regions.