It is the second year since the Liberation Day coincides with a state of collective imprisonment, made necessary by the pandemic. This was decided by the government and the Parliament, the representatives of popular sovereignty, conquered on April 25, 1945 by the anti-fascist parties for all Italians. The same parties, unanimous, proclaimed April 25 a national holiday, “in celebration of the total liberation of the Italian territory”, as stated in the decree signed by Umberto II on April 22, 1946. And together they took part in the Liberation Day in 1947. Then, in the following seven decades, April 25 was a day of bitter contention between the anti-fascist parties, which accused each other of having betrayed the ideals of the Resistance.
An epochal turning point in Italian history
Located in the mid-twentieth century, April 25, 1945 marked an epochal turning point in Italian history. It was the epilogue of a national tragedy, which began with the Great War, continued with the revolutionary convulsion of the “red two-year period”, then with the civil war of squadron fascism against all the opposing parties, suppressed for twenty years by the totalitarian regime, and finally it exploded after 8 September 1943, in a new and more ruthless civil war between fascists and anti-fascists, in a country devastated by furious fighting between foreign armies.
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“Italian anti-fascism – recalled Leo Valiani, one of the leaders of the Resistance and a valuable historian in 1959 – has fought the totalitarian dictatorship, from the very day of the exceptional laws, with the same commitment, with the same spirit of sacrifice and, to the extent of possible, with the same methods that the Resistance used later, at the time of the German occupation ». Strongly antagonistic for twenty years, while fighting against a common enemy, on 9 September 1943 the anti-fascist parties allied themselves in the National Liberation Committee and participated in the United Nations war against Nazi Germany and the fascist republic, and in April 1945, with the insurrections in Genoa, Milan and Turin before the arrival of the allies, they definitively conquered, for the Italian people, the freedom to decide their own destiny.
The struggle for freedom, a common heritage of the Resistance
Despite the controversies raised by the Liberation Day since 1948, the judgment expressed in 1950 by Federico Chabod, militant partisan and great historian can be attributed to April 25, as a symbol of the new popular sovereignty: “What remains as a common heritage of the Resistance , is the popular struggle for freedom. It is a historical fact that will remain in the history of Italy ». The people who fought for freedom were a minority of volunteers, men and women, civilians and military, old and young, belonging to different social classes, to different parties or to no party, willing to sacrifice their lives for the freedom and dignity of ‘Italy. This minority gave all Italians, even their enemies in the civil war, and women who never had it, the right to choose their rulers with the democratic method. On June 2, 1946, the Resistance parties had the consent of 17,550,567 voters, almost 80 percent of those who voted, and together they drafted the text of the Constitution of the democratic republic, which came into force on January 1, 1948.
A solid democracy
For over a quarter of a century, the parties of April 25 have disappeared. New parties have sprung up, without roots in the Resistance, indifferent or polemical towards the Liberation Day, legitimized to govern by the consent of the electors or Parliament. The democracy born of the Liberation has experienced many hardships in 76 years, some of which tormented by terrorist acts of a new civil war: and yet, it has already exceeded the duration of the totalitarian regime by more than half a century, confirming the solidity of its roots. And it can still remain vital, with the constant realization of the principles and ideals of the Constitution.