The
Italian Liberal Party (
Partito Liberale Italiano, PLI) was a
liberal political party in Italy.
History
Origins
The origins of
liberalism in Italy came from the so-called "Historical Right", a faction formed as a parliamentary group by
Camillo Benso di Cavour in the Parliament of the
Kingdom of Sardinia following the
1848 revolution. The Liberals were moderately conservative and supported centralized government, restricted suffrage, regressive taxation, and
free trade; they dominated Italian politics following
Italian unification in 1861 but never formed a party, basing their power on
census suffrage and a
first-past-the-post electoral system.
The Right was opposed by a more progressive faction, the "Historical Left" (using a green color instead of the blue of the Right), which overthrow
Marco Minghetti's government during the so-called "Parliamentary Revolution" of 1876, which allowed the premiership of
Agostino Depretis. However, Depretis immediately began to search the support of the Right MPs, which easily accepted to change their positions, in a situation of large
corruption. This phenomenon (on a satirical newspaper, the Premier was depicted as a
chameleon), called in Italian as
trasformismo (roughly translated in English as "transformism"), cancelled the political differences in the Parliament, which was dominated by an undistinguished liberal bloc with a landslide majority until after
World War I., Britannica...
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