No. 742
Editorial Note
In the June 7 national elections the Center coalition won a clear majority in the Senate but obtained just under 50.1 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies. Therefore, the Center parties failed to receive the 65 percent of the seats in the Chamber they would have under the new electoral law had they won the required majority of the popular vote. A breakdown of the respective parties’ strengths in the new Chamber and Senate, based on early unofficial returns, and a brief discussion of possible effects the elections would have on the government of Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, are in a memorandum of June 10 from the Director of the Office of Western European Affairs, Homer M. Byington, to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Livingston T. Merchant. (Italian Desk files, lot 57 D 56, “Elections (National)”) Copies of letters, dated June 16 and June 22, which Ambassador Alberto Tarchiani sent to Deputy Under Secretary of State H. Freeman Matthews giving his views on the elections are in Italian Desk files, lot 58 D 156, “233—Elections (National)”.
The domestic political situation in Italy was briefly referred to at the 149th meeting of the National Security Council on June 9. According to that portion of the memorandum of discussion dealing with NSC 153, President Eisenhower said that “if some free world country, such as Italy, were actually to elect a Communist government, he did not see how we could do anything to prevent its exercise of power”. For text of the memorandum of discussion of NSC 153 at this meeting, see volume II, Part 1, page 373.