After World War II, it was characterized, throughout Western Europe, by the downsizing of the European superpowers and by the consolidation of the US interference on European countries, through the aid of the Marshall plan. The placement of the European countries in the US orbit obviously led to a declared anti-communist policy. As in Spain, Franco was left in his place, in the name of anti-communism, in Italy, theoretically democratic state, we had to look for other solutions to avoid the rise to power of the strong left parties. Sicily is in this situation, always linked to Italian history, but always with its own history and particular evolution.
This work aims to retrace the fundamental stages of Sicilian Autonomy through, above all, the analysis of the Statute in its application and its evolution, from the post-war period to the seventies-eighties.
The allied landing reawakened the ancestral desire for freedom, which on the Island was inevitably translated into hunger for land. In fact, the peasant movement that emerged grew massive and almost unstoppable. The mafia violence, in fact, was not enough to stop the movement, but the political will, yes.
The end of the war led to the reawakening of political ideologies and the consequent rebirth of mass parties that immediately had to give Italy a new constitutional and democratic structure. However, Italy, in the partition of Yalta, came to be in the US orbit, and this meant above all the mandatory prohibition to bring to power the political groups of the left and in particular the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. At this juncture, the draft Statute of the Autonomous Region of Sicily was approved, which almost imposed the regional order on the Italian State. Specifically, the Bylaws permitted the legislation concerning sectors such as agriculture and industry, effectively freeing the island from state control and slowing down the development of the island’s economic fabric. A devious model of the management of public affairs, a progressive removal of politics from the people, and the formation of a megapartite, the Christian Democracy that incorporated the whole Region into itself, was developed. This involved the ramification of a patronage network and a spread, never seen before, of organized crime.