The Nonviolent Radical Party is a non-governmental organization using nonviolence to create a collection of national or international laws about human rights and the affirmation of democracy and freedom in the world. Although it's named "Party", it hasn't participated in any election during the last twenty-eigth years. It creates synergies between all the political forces for achieving the objectives of its own congressional motions.
It was born in Italy in 1955 spinning off the Liberal Party with the aim of the complete fulfillment of its own Constitution and the actual establishment of the Rule of Law. In its early years, the Party had its cultural reference in the weekly journal "Il Mondo" directed by Mario Pannunzio and in the "Amici del Mondo", a group of liberal, socialist and "azionista" intellectuals, including Ernesto Rossi, that have promoted an anticlerical and anti-partitocratic politics in contrast to both the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party.
In 1962, following the Piccardi's case and due to internal conflicts about the party leadership, the control of the party, apparently arrived at the end of its history, was taken by the unit called Radical Left, until then a minority, that had Marco Pannella as its leader. The Party then took action against the revision of the Lateranensi Pacts between the Italian State and the Vatican, it promoted the first collection of signatures for a revocatory referendum of the Concordato (denied by the Constitutional Court), and carried on some campaigns of accusation against the occult financing in politics, for the affirmation of the Anti-militarism and the civil rights defence. To avoid the internal pressures for "partitocracy", the previous organizational structure based upon socialist-liberal model was abandoned in favor of a libertarian and anti-hierarchic model for which statutory bodies are renewed annually and the political motions are decided yearly, granting to anybody the unlimited free participation and having the strict prohibition of expulsion for anybody, even in case of membership to other political parties.
At the end of the seventies, the Party is engaged in the referendum campaigns for divorce and abortion (along with the Italian League for the Institution of Divorce and the Italian Center for Sterilization and Abortion), as well as on the fronts of anti-prohibitionism, anti-militarism and conscientious objection, on feminism and sexual liberties, also bringing life to the first Italian movement for the homosexuals rights (making a federative pact with the Movement of Liberation of the Woman and the Unitary Front of Italian Revolutionary Homosexuals), the reform of the family legislation, the extension to vote rights for the 18 year old. In contrast with a context of antagonism filled with hatred and violence that flowed into black (fascist) and red (communist) terrorism, the Nonviolent Radical Party uses the Gandhian nonviolence with its atypical means for political action, as well as civil disobedience, self-denunciations, sit-ins, speech marathons, single line demonstrations and other modern forms of political communication.
At the elections of 1976 a small patrol of radical candidates in independent lists with the symbol of the "Rose in the Fist" made its entry in the Italian Parliament. This new phase sees the Radicals bringing new methods of political struggle in Parliament with the massive use of obstructionism and the promotion of transversal legislative initiatives and the "double card membership" to certify a common committment of parlamentarians on shared battles as opposed to the preordered alignments based solely upon ideological biases. On the institutional front, the radical parliamentarians fought for the reform of the prison system, the limitation of the preventive imprisonment, the de-militarization of jailhouses guards corps. Radicals use the popular consensus gained among the people in the streets and make extensive use of the referendum instrument.
In the toughest years of the terrorism, the Radicals alone denounce the "historical compromise" in which the government is supported in parliament by democratic christans and communists, socialists and lay parties (Repubblicans and Liberals) with almost no opposition or alternative, and even offers to open a dialogue with the violent and the terrorists, following the purest Gandhian tradition. It comes later to the light, thanks to the some investigations of the radicals, that wide areas of political terrorism are closely interrelated with the freemasonry, the secret services and other governments structures.
The entry of the Radicals into Parliament spreads a new era also in Italian political communication. The Nonviolent Radical Party refuses to use public funding for its own political activities, seen as distortive of the relationship between party members and party leaders but cannot refuse the money coming from the citizens, so it decides to finance a series of specific initiatives, such as a fund for the victims of terrorism, and then a radio station in the service of all citizens and all political parties. So, Radio Radicale was born. A place where the public financing due to the party gets forwarded. The Radio initiates the transmissions with the objective of the public disclosure (also in a somewhat piratesque form at the beginning) of the parliamentary debates and soon it opens its gate to the recording not only of the political life of the Nonviolent Radical Party itself but also about all the other parties and organizations, making effective the Einaudian "mantra" of "knowing in order to deliberate".
Around the end of the 1960s, and for all the '70s and' 80s, the focus of the Radical militants on the international front was aimed to the democratic deficit of the Eastern countries. Demonstrations and non-violent actions of civil disobedience were organized which ended up in arrests and detentions. The Nonviolent Radical Party and Marco Pannella himself rises up on the campaign for an extraordinary intervention "against the world's starvation and underdevelopment", which breathe life to the international cooperation sector, anticipating in almost a prophetic way the migratory waves of the recent years. The 1980s are for the Radicals a period of transition in which the struggle against authoritarianism is associated with a full in-depth analysis of the Italian State where the difficulties of judicial processes are one of the main obstacles to the full effectiveness of the Constitution. The Party closely monitors the justice business, giving attention to the criminal execution in prisons, to the hottest ongoing trials starting from those about terrorism or mafia, and to the formation of the laws considered "creators of crime". So, the Radicals become the bastion of the Italian movement for protection of civil rights. The vast echo of the political and judicial battle for the case of Enzo Tortora, who resigned from parliamentary election with the Nonviolent Radical Party, renounced to the parliamentary immunity and was arrested and prosecuted. This one event brought to the Radicals high consensus and made them recognized as a major political force within the context of the Italian parties.
The electoral behavior of the Radicals hasn't ever been linear. They voluntarily did not run in elections during the first 20 years of their life and lately, in many cases, they did not present lists or they endorsed specific candidates of other parties. Sometimes Radicals used associations with other lists or in other occasions presented their own symbol as well as encouraged campaign for the abstention.
In this phase, the Party is continually growing its own electoral consensus but disperses it to avoid internal "partitocratic" pressures. During the XXXV Congress of 1989 in Budapest, held for the first time outside the national confines, a profound divergence came out between those who would have liked to explode the party in the national political landscape, and those who, like the historic leader Marco Pannella who preferred to maintain the innovative characteristics of the libertarian party as well as an political tool for no partisan affiliates committed to serving for specific local projects without the use of the name and symbol of the Party itself.
The political movement of 1980 explicitly described the characteristics that in the previous twenty years had connotated the Party's activity according to a properly Pannellian conception: Gandhian non-violence as a distinctive instrument of political struggle, the transnational vision and the inclusive dimension of transparency. In order to reinforce this last condition, in contrast to the "double card membership", the congress, with a large majority, decides that the Party should not present itself any more to the elections in order to avoid competition with the other parties and stimulate cooperation instead. The realization of the new symbol in which the stylized face of Gandhi was depicted and put above the writing "Partito Radicalede" in different languages inscribed in an octagon is the point of no return in the transformation of the Party electoral instrument full of ideological connotations about liberalism and socialism, into an instrument of political fight completely at disposal of the adopted campaigns. The decision provokes great controversy within the Party. Some of the historical radicals left the Party to continue their own activity in other parties or retire to private life. However, many Radicals were still actively engaged in politics, sometimes also supported by the Party itself, sometimes seeking hospitality in traditional parties or creating entirely new electoral lists (e.g. ecologists, anti-prohibizionists..).
The Party has a long period of interest in comparing the conditions of the rule of law among different democracies throughout the world. While continuing to bring economic resources and militancy mainly from the Italian area only, also because of its nature for committing to join initiatives of radical derivation, first and foremost the Marco Pannella's ones, the Party strengthens its transnational activities in the countries of the Eastern Europe. In the mid-1990s, the Party founded and used the Multilingual Telematics System, a sotware based solution on which Agorà Telematics is developed, that is one of the first BBS in Italy to allow multiple connections at the same time with the many countries where the Party has points of presence or headquarters.
In 1995, after an intense institutional work, the Party, while maintaining the organizational model of the libertarian party, transitioned into a non-governmental organization for the promotion of human legislation and for the affirmation of democracy and freedom in the whole world. It has now been officially recognized by the Economic and Social Board (ECOSOC) of the UN to have the consultative status of general level.
Into the UN, the Party carries out high profile battles as the moratorium of the death penalty and the proposal of his total abolition, anti-prohibition against global mafias, initiative for Fair Justice, freedom of scientific research and the battle for abolition of female genital mutilation.
The Party allows access to meetings to the organization of unrepresented people, such as Tibetan, Uiguri and Montagnard, and leads an active monitoring of the conflicts against the despotic regimes, such as the case of Ukraine against Russia or give voice to dissidence against totalitarian regimes like Cuban or Turkish. For these activities and in particular for the proposal of a peace plan in the Chechen conflict, the Party collides with Russia in such a way to risk a procedure of suspension and expulsion from the country, that has been later capable to defend positively.
Despite its inititial success, the initiatives of the Nonviolent Radical Party in Italy mostly failed to find space on the local press which prefers to focus just on highlighting the internal conflicts among the various personalities of the Party, that are sometimes non-existent. The inadequate representation of the radical initiatives by the Italian mass media is meticulously verified via the Center of Hearing of the Information Radiotelevisiva and produces numerous condemnations and compensations to be paid by the public State Television. The initiatives of the Party are confused by the press with those of the historical leader Marco Pannella and his electoral vicissitudes. Further confusion comes from the fact that from the 2000s, rather than ratifying its expansion abroad, the Party preferred to focus on "Italy's chance" as emblematic of the decadence of a constitutional political system in a "real democracy", or into a democracy just in the form but in which in the substance the same institutions act in contrast with the laws of the Constitution itself. According to the Nonviolent Radical Party, Italy represents the apogee of the "partitocratic regime" and, as such, is prepared to spread the "plague" of "real democracy" in the world, as it has denounced at the international institutions and with the book collection Libro Giallo of "The Italian Plague "(after the ruin of the fascist Ventennio, the Sessantennio of the evil metamorphosis).
In the first decade of the new millennium, the Party enters into a crisis due to serious issues of inner governance. The Statuto adopted in 1993 draws a very ambitious evolution based on numerous thematic associations and overblown bodies. Throughout the decade, the Party has supported radical associations by providing heavy economic resources and by making available contacts, instruments and reports in order to make them working at their best, causing a conspicuous increase in the activity of radical associations and a contraction of Party initiatives.
In 2011 a new secretary was elected, the Malian Demba Traoré, who nevertheless left the party without officially resigning, recalled by the responsibility of the government in his own country. With a lack of secretary, the Nonviolent Radical Party is practically inhibited from conducting any autonomous battle.
After the death of historical and charismatic leader Marco Pannella in 2016, for the first time in its history, the members themselves convene an extraordinary Congress to overcome the long inaction due to the absence of the Secretary.
The XL Congress held inside the prison of Rebibbia adopted with a overwhelming majority (of more than 2/3 of the voters) a "pannelliana" motion that summarizes the three most prominent fights of Marco Pannella for the biennium 2017-2018: the Continuation of the battle over Fair Justice, in particular for the means of Amnesty's proposal for the Republic, the promotion of the United States of Europe as well as a necessary instrument for overcoming the localism and nationalism that are splitting up the continent. And, finally, the introduction within the Declaration of the Laws of Man of the fundamental Right to Knowledge as a necessary basis for the transition of countries to a true State of Law.
For the first time in the history of the Party, a presidency of 16 people has been elected and it has been defined as a condition for the continuation of the Party's activities, not only the complete residual debt pay off but also the need for a consistent contribution of new membership to completely change the composition of the party with the subscription of at least 3000 members in the years 2017 and in 2018.
In the absence of these conditions, the Congress has established that the Presidency, without other formalities, will close the Party.