Amintore Fanfani

Fanfani led Christian Democracy's interventionist left and argued that Catholic social teaching was incompatible with laissez-faire capitalism. His INA-Casa plan from 1949 built hundreds of thousands of homes for workers, and his government of 1962 nationalised electricity as part of the "opening to the left" towards the Socialists. The same man led the losing 1974 referendum campaign against legal divorce, a reminder that economic progressives in the tradition could be firm social conservatives.