Status Quo in Jeopardy as Italians Go to Polls : Election: Voters grope for means to contend with crime and institutional and economic crises imperiling<i> la dolce vita.</i>

Bombarded by demands for change and appeals for continuity, enticed with extravagant promises of clean air, good hunting, free love and law and order, Italians went to the polls Sunday for the most uncertain and possibly most unsettling national election in four decades.

With their comfortable political equation suddenly upset by the fall of communism, 47 million voters groped among floating factions for means to confront organized crime and the institutional and economic crises that are imperiling la dolce vita in one of the world’s richest countries.

There will be no official returns for 630 seats in the lower house of Parliament and 315 in the Senate until the polls close after a second day of voting today. Even then, the results may not signal an immediate change in political direction, but they will almost certainly express public disquiet at the status quo.

“The system is dissolving itself. Change is in the making, but nobody knows when and how it will come about,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, a political scientist and two-term leftist senator in danger of losing his seat to protest voters on the right.

As ever, the Christian Democrats, who have retained a dominant share of power since 1948, are the election fulcrum. “This is no time for experiments,” warned party icon Giulio Andreotti, who is serving his seventh term as prime minister.

Across the fragmented political spectrum there is broad agreement on what Italy’s problems are. The argument is whether a warmed-over Christian Democrat-dominated coalition could resolve them any better in the future than in the past.

Organized crime mocks the state and robs it blind: Mafia gunmen coolly murdered an anti-mob police commander on a downtown street in Sicily at midday as Italy prepared to vote. Andreotti claims his party’s four-party coalition has generated unprecedented pressure on organized crime. Opponents ranging from reformers on the left to neo-fascists on the right accuse the Christian Democrats, whose votes are surest where the mob is strongest, of more complicity than commitment to battling crime.

Under the Christian Democrats, Italy has blossomed from a divided and poverty-stricken shell of World War II to become the fifth or sixth richest country in the world. Around their country, today, Italians dine where Americans with depreciated dollars fear to tread.

Yet storm flags are flying, as nine serious opposition parties and a bundle of fringe parties, grouping everything from housewives and pensioners to hunters and car owners, have reminded voters. One of the most enthusiastic members of the European Community, Italy is falling ominously behind its partners, spending more than it earns.

By April 1, Italy’s 1992 budget had already surpassed its projected deficit for the year. The deficit will be around 10% of the gross domestic product. The Italian government debt is 101% of the total of the country’s income from goods and services for 1991.

Andreotti and his government partners have shown no ability to control the deficit or curb the public spending that has helped to produce it--or to rein in runaway public sector corruption. This, his opponents point out, is occurring in a country where public services, from hospitals to telephones to the post office, range from indifferent to scandalous.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Italy today is going through a time of real emergency,” noted Ugo Stille, editor of Milan’s Corriere della Sera, the dean of the nation’s newspapers.

Wooing voters with familiar, avuncular smiles and injunctions against changing horses on a difficult stretch of road, the Christian Democrats hope to retain majority control of Parliament in alliance with the Socialists, who drew 14% in the last national election in 1987, and the small Social Democratic and Liberal parties, which won 5% between them.

The Christian Democrats, who drew 34% of the vote in 1987, expect to lose some of their electorate to protest groups this time but will certainly remain the largest single party. If their coalition is returned, Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi is likely to succeed Andreotti as prime minister.

The partitocrazia that divides institutional power among the ruling parties is under sharp attack by those opponents demanding electoral and institutional reforms.

In a strongly worded front-page editorial Sunday, Eugenio Scalfari, editor of Rome’s La Repubblica, the country’s largest newspaper, said the current coalition parties “had reached the end of the line, incapable of renewing either men or programs. . . . The objective of today’s vote is to dismantle the bureaucracy of party power and to unleash fresh, clean forces and energies.”

The Christian Democrats’ quest to retain power is aided by fragmentation of the Communist opposition as well as the mushrooming of disparate protest movements.

One threat to the Christian Democrats, by contrast, is the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, whose candidates this time include the granddaughter of former dictator Benito Mussolini. The party usually wins around 6% but could profit this year from the defection of voters angry at the Christian Democrats’ policies.

The Communists, whose party was the largest in the West and abandoned Marxism decades before the Russians, officially renamed themselves the Democratic Party of the Left and are now officially democratic socialists. Along the way, though, a hard-line party calling itself Refounded Communism was set up. The Democratic Party of the Left will doubtless retain the former Communists’ standard second-place finish but may fall below 20% this time.

Liberal election laws that distribute parliamentary seats on a strictly proportional formula have encouraged the growth of small parties--some of them serious, such as the Greens, and some frivolous, such as the porn-queen-led Party of Love.

The most serious of the protest groups is the Lega Nord, headed by populist, anti-immigrant Sen. Umberto Bossi, who proposes federalization of Italy into north, central and southern regions.

Bossi has strong support in the rich north and could get almost 10% of the vote.