(Since we were just talking about Italy...)
"...perhaps traded a conservative autocrat in Crispi for a liberal one in Giolitti. This, of course, was not entirely fair - Giolitti's social reforms were rooted in a certain progressivism and it is not particularly a trait of autocracy to expand the voting franchise. Nonetheless, Giolitti was often of the mind that the glue that held together Italy's fractious politics was his own personage, and as he ticked ever-closer to his mid-70s, his worries about his own health and the stability of the system began to grow.
Broad centrist "natural governing" parties across Europe have always had a hard go of it because they open themselves up to attacks from two directions, sniped at by the right for moving too far to the left and by the left for moving too far to the right. For Giolitti's Liberal Union it was even more difficult to manage by late 1915 as there was no particular party structure and his personal patronage was often required to maintain order and unity. Without him, it wasn't clear who exactly could take over between the conservatives arranged around Salandra and Sonnino or the progressives behind Boselli.
For the first time in his tenure, too, Giolitti was increasingly embattled by opposition parties that were not utterly supine to his carefully-managed triangulation, on both left and right, rather than merely regionalist discontent from the South of Italy, which while strong as ever was not particularly organized politically. The election of the ultramontane Domenico Serafini as Pope Gregory XVII at the end of 1913 had reinvigorated the traditionalist Catholic right, which was starting to chafe under the more moderate (albeit quite effective) leadership of Catholic Electoral Union chief Gentiloni and his protege Father Luigi Sturzo and demand a more muscular political Catholicism, a current in Italian politics that may have had some staying power had it not been strictly anti-nationalist and pan-Catholic, thus running into the rocks of the Central European War within a few years. To his left, too, there were problems, increasingly thanks to Giolitti's partnership with the UEC and the unpopular Gentiloni Pact. Sacchi's Radicals had elected to dispense with their refusal to cooperate with the Socialists and so, despite giving Giolitti support for the time being, Sacchi and Nitti had now both expressed willingness to cooperate in a future coalition with not just the Republicans but also the Socialists, who under a grouping of bright, charismatic and young leaders such as Giacomo Matteoti, Niccolo Bombacci and the pugilistic, uncompromising editor of the Socialist Party newspaper, Benito Mussolini. It was this group of revolutionaries who would lead the PSI in the first wave of Socialist parties across Europe either purging their moderates or splitting with them into separate parties throughout the late 1910s that challenged the rise of the movement in the years immediately preceding the war and polarized the left's reactions to it.
As with other European countries at this time, Italy in the mid-to-late 1910s was thus a place of remarkable rising standards of living thanks in large part to Giolitti's social reforms and favorable disposition towards organized labor (especially compared to many classical liberals elsewhere) but also an increasingly educated and demanding electorate leading to a livelier, more complicated political and cultural scene. What created issues for Italy specifically was that the UL was no longer able to simply point and demand and had to manage coalition partners with ideas of their own and an opposition that was increasingly strident in its calls for revolution or reaction, which appealed to workers both in wealthy but unequal Piedmont and Lombardy as well as the impoverished peasantry of the South, and an independent foreign policy that intersected poorly with the ambitions of its neighbors or the Great Detente once pursued by Germany to keep the peace with France. In short, the popular perception of Italy as an erratic time bomb seeking an external conflict to paper over internal issues is grossly overstated, but nonetheless as Giolitti's power and prestige declined, it was an open question what exactly would come next and what exactly that would mean for the average Italian after so many good years under first Crispi and then Giolitti leading many to take that stability for granted..."
- In Rome's Image: Italy and the 20th Century
