Ugo La Malfa (16 May 1903 – 26 March 1979) was an Italian politician and an important leader of the Italian Republican Party (Partito Repubblicano Italiano; PRI).
Early years and anti-fascist resistance
La Malfa was born in Palermo, Sicily. After completing his secondary schooling, he enrolled in the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in the Department of Diplomatic Sciences with professors Silvio Trentin and Gino Luzzatto.
During his years at the university, he had contacts within the republican movement of Treviso and other anti-fascist groups. In 1924, he moved to Rome, and participated in the foundation of the Goliardic Union for Freedom. On 14 June 1925, he took part in the first conference of the National Democratic Union, founded by Giovanni Amendola. The movement was later declared illegal under Mussolini's fascist government. In 1926 he graduated from university with a thesis dealing sharply with human rights. During his military service, he was transferred to Sardinia in order to disrupt the anti-fascist publication Pietre, on which he worked. By 1928 he was among those arrested following the 12 April bombing in the Fiera di Milano for allegedly planning to assassinate Italian King Victor Emmanuel III, only to be interrogated and released.
In 1929 he took a job editing the Treccani Encyclopaedia, working under the direction of the liberal philosopher Ugo Spirito. At the request of Raffaele Mattioli he took a job with Mattioli's Italian Commercial Bank in 1933, of which he became director in 1938. During these years, he showed his expertise in both economics and leadership. There he forged relations between anti-fascist groups in order to build a web that formed the Partito d'Azione, over which he presided as a founder. On 1 January 1943, La Malfa and the lawyer Adolfo Tino succeeded in publishing the first of their clandestine publication, L'Italia Libera. Later that year, La Malfa fled Italy to escape arrest, travelling to Switzerland, where he had contacts with representatives of the British Special Operations Executive. With these he tried to organize a trip to London in order to make use of his personal influence at the Foreign Office. He tried to prevent the Allied invasion of Italy and to obtain a negotiated Italian retreat from the war. Later he returned to Rome in order to take part in the resistance movement with the Partito d'Azione and the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale.
Republican career
In 1945 under the reconstruction government of Ferruccio Parri, La Malfa assumed the role of Minister of Transportation. In the following government, under Alcide De Gasperi, he was Minister of Reconstruction, a position later renamed Minister of International Commerce. In February 1946 the first conference of the Partito d'Azione was held, during which Emilio Lussu prevailed in determining party philosophy, and La Malfa and Parri left the party. In March he participated in the constitution of the Republican Democratic Concentration, which supported the republican referendum in June and contested the related general election. La Malfa and Parri were both elected to the Constituent Assembly of Italy, and with the encouragement of Randolfo Pacciardi he joined the Italian Republican Party, commonly known as the PRI.
Designated to represent Italy to the International Monetary Fund in 1947, he was named vice president of the Fund the following year. Meanwhile, with Giulio Andrea Belloni and Oronzo Reale, he assumed the temporary role of party secretary. Reelected to the parliament in 1948, and confirmed into the subsequent legislature, he held numerous positions, including as a "minister without portfolio" charged with reorganizing the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), before in 1951 he was appointed Minister of Foreign Trade. His work on liberalizing the Italian economy and lowering import tariffs was fundamental to the "economic miracle."
In 1952 he proposed, without success, a "constituent program" between the secular parties. In 1956, while maintaining the autonomy of the Republican Party from Marxist economic theories and its position on the left of the political spectrum, he favored the unification of the three major socialist schools to make the divide between his party and theirs more comprehensible.