Guareschi belonged to no party. He was anti-Communist but had sympathy for ordinary people; he was no friend of the Christian Democrats but a convinced Christian; habitually and intellectually a conservative, he was in method an anarchist who employed irony and humour to reach his goal. Candido was the reflection of this philosophy. In all of Europe there was no comparable paper—and certainly none with such success. His newspaper did not serve as a platform for making unctuous addresses to the people—a tone that today’s journalism also strikes in order to make itself important, to be part of politics itself, to fawn over the powerful one moment and attack them for partisan reasons the next. Candido did not lecture, it celebrated neither itself nor its position. It was a thorn in the side of the zeitgeist, and it had a duty only to its conscience and its readers.
This did not prevent Candido from taking clear political positions. It was the only major newspaper to back the monarchy in the 1946 referendum on Italy’s form of state. In the 1948 election it joined the fight to prevent a Communist takeover—caricatures like “In the voting booth God sees you, Stalin does not” became election posters. Unsparingly, it reported on the Communist violence of the postwar years: the sabotage, the destruction, the murders. It even foresaw the danger of an Italian Republic fattened on consumption, hedonism, and materialism.