The Italian Liberal Party (, PLI) was a liberal and conservative political party in Italy. The PLI, which is the heir of the liberal currents of both the Historical Right and the Historical Left, was a minor party after World War II, but also a frequent junior party in government, especially since 1979. The party disintegrated in 1994 following the fallout of the Tangentopoli corruption scandal, succeeded by several minor parties. History Origins The origins of liberalism in Italy are in the Historical Right, a parliamentary group formed by Camillo Benso di Cavour in the Parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia following the 1848 revolution. The group was moderately conservative and supported centralised government, restricted suffrage, regressive taxation, and free trade. They dominated politics following Italian unification in 1861 but never formed a party, basing their power on census suffrage and a first-past-the-post voting system. The Right was opposed by its more progressive counterpart, the Historical Left, which overthrew Marco Minghetti's government during the so-called "Parliamentary Revolution" of 1876, which brought Agostino Depretis to become Prime Minister. However, Depretis immediately began to look for support among Rightists MPs, who readily changed their positions, in a context of widespread corruption. This phenomenon, known in Italian as trasformismo (roughly translatable in English as "transformism" — in a satirical newspaper, the PM was depicted as a chameleon), effectively removed political differences in Parliament, which was dominated by an undistinguished liberal bloc with a landslide majority until World War I. Two parliamentary factions alternated in government, one led by Sidney Sonnino and the other, by far the largest of the two, by Giovanni Giolitti. The latter was known as Liberal Union since 1913 and was finally also re-joined by Sonnino. At that time the Liberals governed in alliance with the Radicals, the Democrats and, eventually, the Reformist Socialists. The brief party At the end of World War I, universal suffrage and proportional representation were introduced. These reforms caused big problems to the Liberals, which found themselves unable to stop the rise of two mass parties, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the Italian People's Party (PPI), which had taken the control of many local authorities in northern Italy even before the war. The Catholic PPI opposed the PSI, but also the Liberals and, generally, the Right, under the consequences of the capture of Rome and the struggles between the Holy See and the Italian