Everybody 'wins' Italian Elections

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STOP-NUCLEAR INSANETY!

- Glowing future under Carter Last week Flaminio Piccoli allowed himself a public sigh of relief.

'Stability is preserved', said the Secretary General of the Italian Christian Democratic In reality Italian parliamentary and electoral politics are stable in about the same sense as the San Andreas fault.

What Piccoli meant is that in spite of the tremors before the regional and municipal elections of June 8, the earthquake didn't happen this time.

And that is because the Italian electors continued to obey the unwritten and very special rules of Italian electoral The first of these is that no election result is allowed to be very different from the previous one.

This is so that no obvious conclusions are ever possible about the shifting balance of power between the main parliamentary parties.

. Everyone can then interpret barely perceptible changes in The recommendations of a recent report on nuclear waste storage in the USA have been included in a plan President Carter has sent to Congress. It calls for burying radioactive materials in underground rock formations by the mid-1990s.

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COMMITTEE DISCUSSION BULLETIN No. 2 TILC Declaration Price 40p plus 15p p&p from WSL, BM Box 5277, London WCIV 6XX their percentages of the vote as clear confirmations of the correctness of their policies.

This is very closely connected therefore, with the second rule. This states that, as with children's party games, and prizes hidden in the Christmas pudding, everybody has to win.

The corollorary of this, of course, is that by a slightly different but equally plausible interpretation of the results everybody loses.

•. Increased share So on June 8 the Christian Democrats "won" They increased their share of the poll by 1.5% since the previous regional elections in 1975.

They also won because the Socialist Party, which had just entered a new centre left coalition in the central government with the Christian Democrats, increased its share of the vote by 3% since last year's parliamentary elections. (Italian voters very nearly broke the rules here by producing too large a change from the previous - PENNSYEV A small number of potential sites would be evaluated over the next five years and by 1985 one of them would be selected as the first facility for long-term storage of nuclear waste.

In March 1978 President Carter established an Interagency Review Group on Nuclear Waste Management, which consisted of representatives from 14 federal agencies, to report to him on the viability of underground nuclear waste disposal.

• Adequate This review group completed its work recently and its findings have strongly influenced Carter's proposed legislation in this field.

The review group recommended that:

1) Scientific knowledge is adequate to begin looking for a permanent. repository for nuclear waste.

2) More basic research is needed into suitable containers and geologic formations, because unless the solution to nuclear waste appears to be plausible, then local resistance may prove a great obstacle to the implementation of waste isolation schemes.

Not allowed 3) No state should be allowed to bar all nuclear disposal within its borders, but should be . consulted at each stage of a waste isolation plan.

4) States should participate election.

The Christian Democrats' explanation of the Socialist Party's success is that the extra votes were the SP's reward for being sensible enough to join Francesco Cossiga's coalition But, of course, according to the rules, the Christian Democrats also lost.

The main argument for this is that virtually none of the so-called "red administrations" in the regions and municipalities (coalitions of the Communist and Socialist Parties) were unseated in the elections-therefore, so the argument goes, there was no move towards restoring to office the local Christian Democratic administrations unseated in 1975.

Combined vote

Indeed the combined Communist-Socialist vote rose as a share of the total since the legislative elections of last year. But the CP finds it easier to argue that the Christian DemoICE more fully in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing procedures.

5) The President should establish an 18-member State Planning Council consisting of some state governors, representatives of Indian tribes and the public. Its responsibilities would encompass a wide range of nuclear waste disposal problems, such as siting and timetables.

Significantly, in Carter's plan the federal government do not propose to give the states the power of veto on waste disposal sites.

But he has set up a planning council consisting of 13 state governois, _and others, under Governor Richard W. Riley of South Carolina to give them a voice in policy.

Objections

Many states have voiced strong objections to having nuclear waste on their territory; notably Utah-whose residents are already exposed to abnormally high levels of radiation from the Nevada test site.

Residents of high-rise buildings in Utah are advised not to look out of their windows during nuclear testing in Nevada for fear of eyedamage..

Governor Riley's state is the home of the Savannah River waste storage facility that is already one of three that is being used for low-level and military wastes.

Other states that are threatcrats lost than that they themselves won. This is because the CP's own share of the poll was the lowest they have achieved in the last three nation-wide elections-despite a relatively fiery oppositional campaign.

Contradictions

What the results do highlight is the way in which the contradictions and delicate balance of Italian electoral polities have become concentrated in the Socialist Party.

Both Christian Democrats and Communists now have to base arguments for their own victory not on their own success but on that of the Socialists.

Far from boosting the Socialist Party as a whole this simply accentuates the already deep and increasingly virulent split between its right and left factions.

The right says they did well because of their central government alliance with the Christian Democrats. The left says it was because of their municipal Car ened are Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, Nevada, Washington (site of the Mount. St. Helens volcano) and New Mexico.

A waste plant at Carlsbad in New Mexico is at present restricted to use by the military nuclear programme.

Arsenal

But this site, together with Savanah River, the Nevada test site and the Hanford nuclear arsenal in Washington are all likely to be strong contenders for a high-level nuclear waste isolation project.

They are already heavily involved in nuclear waste programmes and local opposition is therefore likely to be weaker here than in the case of a new site.

There is no doubt that some means of disposing safely of the existing high-level nuclear waste must be found.

But unti that time no further wastes should be produced. This means a halt to the nuclear power programme.

The gutless State Planning Council is a token to assuage criticism of Carter's proposals.

Labour movement

It is essential that an organis ation is built by the labour movement to oppose the right of the US government and energy monopolies to dump lethal wastes where only they see fit.

alliance with the Communists.' Both the CP and the Christian Democrats seem quite content at the moment to let this situation continue.

By watching the surrogate battle within the Socialist Party they keep their own armies out of the fight and so stave off for a little longer the earthquake of class battles which have threatened for so long to break out in Italy:

Abstentions But for all the parties there was an ominous' sign in these election results. The percentage to rise most was that of abstentions and spoiled papers.

The electors seem to be beginning to tell the political leaders that they are unwilling to go on playing parliamentary charades for ever.

Nuclear fuel store In Britain, too, potential nuclear waste disposal sites have been proposed for investigation by Thatcher's government. • But will we have even the token gesture of a planning council?

The debate on nuciear waste disposal must be forced into the open so that proposals can be criticised, exposed and fought by the workers' movementwhich alone can take the necessary steps to safeguard the future of the human race from the anarchy and vandalism of the capitalist exploiters. SA week week

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