Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (61 page)

“electoral victory” but as a “national plebiscite” in favor of Fascism as a

whole (
Il Popolo d’Italia
, April 8, 1924). On the other hand, Fascism—for

——————

2 Often neglected by scholars, but achieving a great impact at a time of international tension, after the Munich agreement of September 1938: the votes obtained on December 4 in the Czechoslovakian region of Sudetenland were a plebiscite of annexation to the
Reich
and a partial renewal of the
Reichstag
with the inclusion of 41 new representatives.

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235

the first time in modern European history—transformed elections into

plebiscites through a series of laws.3The two plebiscites that were held took

place at the end of the
normal
five-year period of parliamentary legislation, and not as a result of the dictatorship choosing the most propitious moment to call a plebiscite about a political question.4

In Germany—both in the
Reich
and in the Saar, in Austria and in Sude-

tenland—between March 1933 and December 1938, there were seven

polls, roughly one per year. This is evidence of the
permanent mobilization
to which German citizens were subjected, one of the distinguishing features

of Nazism as a whole. A real election took place on March 5, 1933, but this

was an election that was interpreted by contemporaries as an authentic

“plebiscite” (Schmitt 1935, 178), a “historic event, a plebiscitary decision

on the new form of the State” (Poetzsch-Heffter 1935, 9; Jung 1995, 15–

16; Corni 2010, 186–187). The first two plebiscites were proclaimed on the

basis of an
ad hoc
law: the plebiscite of November 12, 1933 was on Ger-

many’s exit from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference,

and the plebiscite of August 19, 1934 was called when Hitler also became

head of state after the death of Hindenburg. On March 29, 1936, there was

an election that could be defined as an
election-plebiscite
. The German people were called to the ballot box to say Y
es
to the single list of a single party, the Nazi Party: it was formally only an election, but on a substantial

plebiscitary question, the re-militarization of the Rhineland. Two other

plebiscites were held in 1938: on the same ballot paper, Germans voted for

a new
Reichstag
and the ratification of the birth of
Grossdeutschland
(
Anschluss
of Austria on April 10; annexation of Sudetenland on December 4). Lastly,

a further plebiscite, on the return of the Saar region to Germany, was held

on January 13, 1935. This was a poll controlled externally by the League of

Nations. Nazism was adept, however, at using polls effectively, organizing

huge propaganda campaigns and then receiving an extraordinary injection

of international
legitimization
from the successful result; in this case, the return of the Saar region to the German
Heimat
.

——————

3 Law 1019 of May 17, 1928; electoral unified code (Royal Decree of September 2, 1928, No 1993); Head of Government’s Decree, September 8, 1928, No 2225; Royal Decree

of January 17, 1929, No 13. There was a single electoral roll, of 400 “designated representatives”, with a single national electoral College. See Camera dei Deputati (1929, 153-160).

4 A recent dictionary on Fascism has separate entries for “Elections” and “Plebiscites”.

Dal Lago (2005).

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E N Z O F I M I A N I

We cannot, however, ignore the fact that historians disagree on the

definition of
plebiscite
applied to the two regimes. This is particularly true for the German regime. In fact, if we follow a purely formal and legal criterion, there were only three Nazi plebiscites, and these three—1933, 1934,

Anschluss
1938—are examined by the scholar who has investigated the

issue most thoroughly (Jung 1995; 1998). In effect, every time the Ger-

mans entered a polling station during the Nazi regime, they were asked not

so much to vote for a parliamentary representative or for a territorial refer-

endum as to express “their solemn approval of the [politics] of re-estab-

lishment of national honor and sovereignty of the
Reich
” (RGB 1936/I,

133). The parliamentary elections were evidently a direct and extraordinary

(and therefore plebiscitary) testing of the people’s attitude towards the

regime in its entirety. The renewal of the composition of the
Reichstag
was simply a pretext to hold the ballot. Jung, taking a different position on

these issues from previous theses, has denied that the features of the “
Sys-

tem plebiszitärer Akklamation
” (Bracher 1960, 348) or of “plebiscitary

power”(Kershaw 1991, 88–104) can be attributed to Nazism, because only

two of Hitler’s plebiscites officially applied the law of 1933. Jung speaks,

rather, of a real
Abschaffung
(Jung 1995, 82–91), an “elimination” of the plebiscite after the disappointing results in 1934. (The vote for the
Anschluss,
in fact, is seen to have been a sort of
retaliation
against the Austrian government’s decision to call a free plebiscite opposing annexation). I

believe, however, that the historian should be less constricted by formal

criteria. I think it would be misleading to measure the plebiscitary nature of

a regime according to legal criteria alone: the plebiscite as a principle can-

not be identified with the juridical instrument.5

According to the same logic, Fascism should not be removed from the

array of dictatorships based—
not only
,
but also
—on plebiscites, simply because the polls held in 1929 and 1934 were, formally, parliamentary and

normal
elections. Both regimes (with their respective measures and modes) managed to combine
totalitarian and plebiscitary
elements, and indeed derived part of their success from this
mix
.

——————

5 I couldn’t agree more with Rapone (2010, 146-147).

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National Socialist and Fascist Ideas on Parliamentary and

Popular Democracy

In Italy, after the last plebiscitary vote in 1934, the electoral criterion was

abandoned as a means to select members of Parliament. The laws on the

plebiscite were annulled in 1939. The “Chamber of Deputies” was replaced

by the “Chamber of Fasci and Corporations”, an assembly whose compo-

sition was predetermined and no longer dependent on ratification by

popular vote: the members had a seat merely by virtue of their belonging

to the Party machine. This abrogation was accompanied by the decision to

avoid, by law, any juridical norm that left the door open to further plebi-

scites.6 This conscious renouncement of popular legitimization and of the

periodical public
consensus
represented by plebiscites was probably one of the weaknesses inherent in Fascist power.

In Germany, on the other hand, Nazism formally kept alive the parlia-

mentary electoral institution of the
Reichstag,
although, from March 1933

onwards, it was virtually a nazified fake of democracy. The electoral law

did not change, but it was void of any meaning, with a single party and a

single list of candidates. Nazism never abandoned popular ratification,

except during the war. While in Italy, then, the dates of plebiscitary elec-

tions were determined by the periods of parliamentary legislature, in Ger-

many the opposite was the case: on three occasions, the plebiscite was used

to interrupt the period of legislature. A new
Reichstag
was elected to coincide with direct popular consultation, which therefore dictated the pace of

parliamentary life.

Thus, Fascist plebiscites, called according to laws establishing their

regular occurrence, appear to be bereft of that
unpredictability
, that extemporary
dramatization
of a bond between the leader and his people according to the particular political need of the moment—something that was typical of

Nazism. Hitler’s government had acquired a legislative instrument, the

Gesetz über Volksabstimmung
of July 14, 1933. (Significantly, this was passed on the very same day as the law to suppress all political parties except the

NSDAP).7 German law contemplated the possibility of consulting the

people on
any
act of government policy, leaving the executive free to es-

——————

6 Laws of January 1939: No 10 of January 5, No 127 and No 129 of January 19. See Rapone (2010, 163-166).

7 RGB (1933/I: 479). There is no monographic study on the law. See the latest work—in Italian—by Corni (2010).

238

E N Z O F I M I A N I

tablish the
if
, the
when
and the
object
of the plebiscitary ballot. In the Italian law, on the other hand, the Fascist plebiscites revealed themselves to be

predictable in the institutional dynamics of the regime, a sort of
routine

unlike the unexpected (but in actual fact carefully studied) plebiscites

brought into being by Hitler’s political
imagination
: by the very nature of their being
plebiscitary elections
, Italian votes took a sort of midway position between a strongly plebiscitary system and the kind of non-competitive

elections typical of a single-party regime.

This different use of plebiscites found confirmation in the forms of po-

litical mobilization and propaganda campaigns of the two regimes. Elec-