The 18 April 1948 Italian election: seventy years on

Italy's election on 4 March was far from the first Italian election campaign to have generated high levels of interest across the rest of Europe. Effie G. H. Pedaliu writes on the seventieth anniversary of one of Italy's most significant and controversial elections: the 1948 Italian general election, which pitted the country's Christian Democrats against the Popular Democratic Front in which the Italian Communist Party, the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union, was the dominant partner.