Italian Socialist Party

Italian Socialist Party, former Italian political party, one of the first Italian parties with a national scope and a modern democratic organization. It was founded in 1892 in Genoa as the Italian Workers’ Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani) and formally adopted the name Italian Socialist Party in 1893.

The original basis of the party lay among trade unions, socialist circles, and cooperative organizations and included conservative reformists, revolutionaries, and syndicalists. Throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the party’s left wing (or maximalists) fought for control against its reformists (led by Filippo Turati). The maximalists supported revolutionary reforms and utilized revolutionary rhetoric, while the reformists built strong power bases in the northern cities and among the rural workers of the Po Valley. One maximalist leader was Benito Mussolini, but he was expelled in 1914 because he favoured Italy’s entrance into World War I. During that war the PSI took a neutral and pacifist position, yet within the party, intense struggle continued between the factions. In 1919 at the Bologna Congress the left took leadership of the party, joined the Communist International (Comintern), and attempted revolutionary upheaval. After an enormous wave of strikes, demonstrations, and factory occupations in 1919–20, a reaction set in. The party was crushed by fascist squads and by its own failure to carry out an effective reform program or to foment a revolution. While the majority of the party retreated, the left broke away to join the Italian Communist Party.

The PSI was driven underground in 1926, and in 1934 it formed an alliance with the communists. From the end of World War II until 1969, the party was run by the charismatic antifascist Pietro Nenni, who served in several cabinets as vice-premier of Italy. The formal alliance with the communists lasted until the mid-1950s, when the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech led the PSI to denounce the Soviet Union. The party remained torn over the question of whether to collaborate with the Christian Democrats or the communists.

After much hesitation the party joined a Christian Democratic government in 1963. Thereafter the PSI was part of or supported many centre-left governments, and in 1983 Bettino Craxi became the first socialist premier. His first government (1983–86) lasted longer than any other since World War II. A second coalition government (1986–87) was less successful. The PSI continued as a major partner in centrist coalition governments until the early 1990s, when Craxi and numerous other party figures were implicated in financial scandals and political corruption. In the 1994 elections, the PSI lost most of its seats in Parliament and was reduced to a relatively minor party.

The PSI effectively ceased to exist in its previous form, and in 1994 the party was transformed into the Italian Socialists (Socialisti Italiani, SI). The SI merged with two other leftist parties in 1998 to form the Italian Democratic Socialists (Socialisti Democratici Italiani, SDI).