You think of the First Republic and the association is almost immediate. That manual for the almost millimetric distribution of power and seats has gone down in history. Massimiliano Cencelli died in Rome on the afternoon of Saturday, August 8: he was 90 years old. In the Sixties he was an official of the Christian Democracy (DC) but his surname will forever be associated with a method for assigning political and governmental roles to representatives of various parties or factions in proportion to their political weight. The expression of the manual is journalistic but has become part of common language. But it also brings to mind the term “lottizzazione” (parceling out), of which the manual perhaps represents the most scientific application.
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How the manual was born
It was Cencelli himself who revealed how the manual was born in an interview with the newspaper “Avvenire” in 2003: “In 1967 Sarti, with Cossiga and Taviani, founded at the Milan congress the faction of the ‘pontieri’ – he recalled – so called because it had to act as a bridge between the majority and the left. We obtained 12% and there was the need to decide the appointments in the leadership. Then I proposed: if we have 12%, as in the board of directors of a company the appointments are divided based on the shares held, the same must happen for party and government appointments based on membership cards. Sarti told me to work on it. In that way Taviani kept the Interior Ministry, Gaspari was Undersecretary of Posts, Cossiga at Defense, Sarti at Tourism and entertainment. The matter became public because during government crises, Sarti, who liked to joke, always answered journalists who wanted previews: ‘ask Cencelli’.”
Rotondi: his manual remains a political masterpiece
“More than the party leader, Cencelli has always remained in the news, he has never left it and never will. His masterpiece was a manual as celebrated as it was paradoxically never published: the Cencelli manual,” comments Gianfranco Rotondi, former DC leader, now FdI deputy. “The Cencelli manual associated – continues Rotondi – every power position (minister, undersecretary, commission president) with a ‘power score’, allowing governments to be formed with a correct distribution of appointments among allied parties and their internal factions. In fact, it is still in use, in the sense that parceling out still exists. Massimiliano made it scientific, and that was his merit, the most famous, not the only one: he was honest and loyal, like all DC officials, a structure wanted and selected by Fanfani, when he decided that De Gasperi’s party-movement had to become the party-state. The rest is Italian history.”
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Mastella: his manual should be reprinted
“Goodbye Massimiliano, with your political intelligence you understood that it was necessary to value all political sensitivities and an alliance was such only in mutual respect. Your manual was a distillate of applied political grammar. It should be reprinted so that many in today’s center-left read it.” This is the farewell from the mayor of Benevento and NdC leader, Clemente Mastella. “The DC – recalls the mayor of the Sannio capital – was home to extraordinary minds like Cencelli, besides the manual he was among the founders, with Cossiga and Taviani, of the pontieri faction, another key word to recover, symbol of a brilliant synthesis of the variety that politics always expresses and of rejection of pre-established hatreds. His legacy remains current: condolences to the family.”
Napoli: with him power learned the importance of limits
“Massimiliano Cencelli was for many years – unjustly, as many of his own opponents recognize – the symbol of an insatiable and never satisfied power, eager to perpetuate itself against all logic and electoral will. Berlusconi had to arrive, the apostles of bipolarism and the croupiers of all-in had to appear on the scene: whoever wins, wins everything and does what he wants. Cencelli, with his famous ‘manual’, reminded the DC, the party he joined in 1954, that the essence of power in democracy is given by its limits and their respect. Even better: that power, attributed by the voters, is not a conquest nor the spoils of a war, but rather the tool to be used sparingly to respond to the country’s needs and to grow, with material well-being, new spaces of democracy and freedom.” Thus Osvaldo Napoli, of the national direction of Azione.
