Massimiliano Cencelli died in Rome on Saturday afternoon, he was 90 years old. A Christian Democracy official in the 1960s, he became known for giving his name to the famous “Cencelli Manual,” a phrase that has become firmly established in Italian political language.
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The so-called manual was not actually an official document, but a journalistic criterion used to describe the distribution of political and governmental assignments among parties and factions in proportion to their weight. Even today the term is used when ministries, presidencies, or other responsibilities must be assigned while trying to respect the balance among the different political forces. The expression has also made its way into university texts.
The origin of the “manual” was recounted by Cencelli himself in an interview granted to Avvenire in 2003. The official recalled that in 1967 Sarti, together with Cossiga and Taviani, founded the “bridge-builders” faction at the Milan congress, born with the aim of creating a link between the majority and the left.
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The faction obtained 12% and the problem of distributing assignments arose. Cencelli proposed applying to politics a criterion similar to that used in companies, where roles are assigned based on the shares held. “We got 12% and there was the question of deciding the assignments in the leadership. So I proposed: if we have 12%, just as in a company’s board of directors the assignments are divided based on the shares held, the same must happen for party and government assignments based on membership cards.” From that principle came the distribution of assignments: Taviani kept the Interior Ministry, Gaspari became undersecretary of the Post Office, Cossiga went to Defense, and Sarti to Tourism and Entertainment. The method became famous when Sarti, during government crises, answered journalists: “ask Cencelli.”
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