During the early 20th century, the
Sammarinese Democrats were a free group of liberal politicians which supported the democratic reforms introduced by the
Meeting of 1906, and that were the moderate alternative to the
leftist Sammarinese Socialist Party. The
progressive political wind blowing in the small republic, and the
plurality-at-large electoral system, banned any type of consistent
Conservative activism in the Sammarinese political life for quite a dozen of years. The situation heavily changed due to
World War I. Even if the country was officially neutral, many volunteers supported the Italian struggle alongside the democratic world, and the
inflation striking the
Italian lira hugely touched the Sammarinese economy, and finally the social and political life. Strikes and violence exacerbated the political situation, with the
landowners taking strength in a match of respective extremisms. The Democratic Union was founded in the summer of 1920. It was not a political party, but a
political movement effectively claiming the return to the pre-1906 institutional asset. Despite the Union's third-place finish in the now-
proportional elections of 1920 behind the
centrist Sammarinese People's Party and the Socialists, it began to be heavily helped by its
Italian counterpart and, later, directly by some
Fascist squads led by
Italo Balbo, and by a
Carabinieri garrison called by the
Sammaninese government after the murder of Fascist activist Bosi on May 21, 1921. A Union member,
Giuliano Gozi, founded the
Sammarinese Fascist Party as a Union spin-off on August 26, 1922. The Socialists were banned from the
elections of 1923, during which the Union joined the Fascist-led
Patriotic Bloc with all other
centre-right forces.
San Marino became an authoritarian, fascist state, and the Union disbanded itself in 1925. == References ==