[13] The PPI won over 20% of the votes in the 1919 and 1921 general elections, but was declared illegal by the Fascist dictatorship in 1926 despite the presence of some Popolari in Benito Mussolini's first government.

In the 1948 general election the DC went on to win a decisive victory, with the support of the Catholic Church and the United States, and obtained 48.5% of the vote, its best result ever.

Under De Gasperi, major land reforms were carried out in the poorer rural regions in the early postwar years, with farms appropriated from the large landowners and parcelled out to the peasants.

In addition, during its years in office, Christian Democrats passed a number of laws safeguarding employees from exploitation, established a national health service, and initiated low-cost housing in Italy's major cities.

From 1954 the DC was led by progressive Christian Democrats, such as Amintore Fanfani, Aldo Moro and Benigno Zaccagnini, supported by the influential left-wing factions.

In 1963 the party, under Prime Minister Aldo Moro, formed a coalition with the PSI, which returned to ministerial roles after 16 years, the PSDI and the PRI.

This was a very different position from the one taken in similar cases before and after (such as the kidnapping of Ciro Cirillo, a Campanian DC member for whom a ransom was paid thanks to the local ties of the party with the Camorra).

Later the memorial written by Moro during his imprisonment was subject[clarification needed] to several plots, including the assassination of journalist Mino Pecorelli and general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

DC re-gained the post of prime minister in 1987, after a modest recovery in the 1987 general election (34.2%), and the Pentapartito coalition governed Italy almost continuously until 1993.

In 1992 the Mani pulite investigation was started in Milan, uncovering the so-called Tangentopoli scandals (endemic corruption practices at the highest levels), and causing numerous, often controversial, arrests and resignations.

After the dismal result in the 1992 general election (29.7%), also due to the rise of Lega Nord in northern Italy and two years of mounting scandals (which included several Mafia investigations which notably touched Andreotti), the party was disbanded in 1994.

The left-wing factions stayed within the new PPI, though a minority would form the Social Christians in 1993 and would join forces with the post-communist Democratic Party of the Left (DPS).

Faced with flagging poll numbers, the PPI formed Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy (DL) after allying three other smaller, social liberal parties to contest the 2001 election.

In economics, the DC preferred competition to cooperation, supported the model of social market economy, and rejected the Marxist idea of class struggle.

[21] In the early years, centrists and liberal-conservatives such as Alcide De Gasperi, Giuseppe Pella, Ezio Vanoni and Mario Scelba led the party.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the great Cold War ideological conflict, and ultimately the Tangentopoli scandals, the heterogeneous nature of the party led it to its collapse.

In its early years, the party was stronger in Northern Italy (especially in eastern Lombardy and Veneto), due to the strong Catholic roots of those areas, than it was in the South.

There, the Liberal establishment that had governed Italy for decades before the rise of Benito Mussolini still had grip on voters, as well as the Monarchist National Party and the Common Man's Front.

In the 1983 general election the party suffered a dramatic decrease in term of votes and its electoral geography was very different from 30 or even 10 years before, as the region where it obtained the best result was Apulia (46.0%).

In the 1992 general election the shift was even more evident as the party was over the 40% mark only in some Southern regions (41.1% in Campania, 44.5 in Basilicata and 41.2% in Sicily), while it barely reached 20-25% of the vote in the North.

Meanwhile, the successor parties of the DC continued to be key political actors only in the South, where the clientelistic way of government practised by the Christian Democrats and their allies had left a mark.

In the 1960s, scandals involved frauds such as huge illegal profits in the administration of banana import quotas and preferential allocation of purposely misprinted and therefore rare postage stamps.

Leaders such as Antonio Gava, Calogero Mannino, Vito Ciancimino, Salvo Lima and especially Giulio Andreotti were perceived by many to belong to a grey zone between simple corruption and Mafia business, even if most of them were later acquitted.