The Independent Left ({{langx, it, Sinistra indipendente) was an Italian parliamentary group in the

Italian Senate The Senate of the Republic (), or simply the Senate ( ), is the upper house of the bicameral Italian Parliament, the lower house being the Chamber of Deputies. The two houses together form a perfect bicameral system, meaning they perform iden ...

between 1968 and 1992. Its forerunner was the ''Democrats of the Left'' group which was active between 1948 and 1953 and formed by independent

leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politi ...

senators elected into the Popular Democratic Front. A group of ''Independent Democrats of the Left'' then existed from 1953 to 1963. The Independent Left was created by the

Italian Communist Party The Italian Communist Party (, PCI) was a communist and democratic socialist political party in Italy. It was established in Livorno as the Communist Party of Italy (, PCd'I) on 21 January 1921, when it seceded from the Italian Socialist Part ...

with the goal to reinforce its leadership over the Italian left after the passage of the

Italian Socialist Party The Italian Socialist Party (, PSI) was a Social democracy, social democratic and Democratic socialism, democratic socialist political party in Italy, whose history stretched for longer than a century, making it one of the longest-living parti ...

to an alliance with the centrist

Christian Democracy Christian democracy is an ideology inspired by Christian social teaching to respond to the challenges of contemporary society and politics. Christian democracy has drawn mainly from Catholic social teaching and neo-scholasticism, as well ...

. The group was formed by past members of the Socialist Party, actors, judges, and many leftist

Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

s who did not become full members of the Communist Party because it was seen as an

atheist Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...

organization. The senators belonging to the group were elected into the Communist lists, so this group ceased to exist after the disbandment of the PCI in 1991.

See also