Communists May Suffer In Italian Poll

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31680, 16 May 1968, Page 20

Communists May Suffer In Italian Poll

ROME, May 15. The Italian Communist Party, the biggest in the West, is suffering from a leadership and credibility gap that seems likely to produce the party’s first setback since World War II in national elections on May 19 and May 20, writes Robert C. Doty, of the “New York Times” News Service. He continues: This speculation on Communist fortunes is one of the rare elements of suspense in an election that is expected to produce few major changes in the balance of political power. The Centre-Left coalition of Christian Democrats. Socialists and Republicans led by the Christian Democratic Prime Minister, Mr Aldo Moro, that has ruled Italy since December, 1963, is virtually certain to win a new majority in the 630-member Chamber of Deputies and 315-seat Senate. The coalition has an undistinguished record of performance on its pledges to reform Italy’s archaic administrative machine, anarchic tax struc ture, outdated educational and health services and clogged, snail’s-pace justice. Its principal merit—a substantial one —has been its willingness to follow good economic advice that pulled Italy out of a serious recession and into the highest growth-rate in the West, second in the world only to that of Japan But 60 days of campaigning by the eight active Italian parties have failed to stir the electorate to real enthusiasm either for the Centre Left parties or the conservative or extreme Left alternatives.

The Italian proportional electoral system is designed to maximise the importance of party programmes, ideologies and behind-the-scenes men who manage them and minimise the threat of Individual deputies. This is a strange pheno-

menon for those who remember the intense passion, the brooding atmosphere of barely - suppressed - violence, the breathless attention of the outside world that focussed on the Italian elections of 1948, and, to some extent, subsequent ones. Those earlier contests had, for Western eyes, a villain—the muscle-flexing Communist Party claiming a quarter of the electorate —and a hero —the Christian Democratic Party, standing like Horatio at the bridge, barring the way to revolution. Today, neither of these roles is being believably played. The Christian Democrats, after 20 years in power, show signs of unheroic wear and tear. This shows in the form of a score of money and influence scandals, major and minor, generally involving second-rank party figures rather than national leaders and in the development of rival clans, from conservatives to a small extreme Left willing to “dialogue” with communism.

The revolutionary militancy went by the reasoned decision of the late Mr Palmiro Togliatti, for a long time the party secretary, who decided to bid for Democratic respectability and work ostensible within the Parliamentary framework instead of in the streets.

The subtlety to carry this out with effect was lost at Togliatti’s death in 1965. His successor, the ageing (71-year-old) stodgy party regular, Mr Luigi Longo, goes through Mr Togliatti’s paces but cannot seem to make the distance. Membership in the party and youth auxiliary has declined from a 1954 record of more than 2,500,000 to about 1,700,000. Over the same period the Communists have lost revolutionary militancy, inspiring leadership, members and plausibility as a governing alternative. But, until now, they have managed to increase their share of the vote at each of three elections.

The plausibility of the Communist bid for power largely disappeared when old Socialist leader, Pietro Nenni, now

Vice-Prime Minister, beginning in 1958, broke the postwar alliance with communism and, by 1963, took his party into government with the Christian Democrats. Until that time, the Socialist strength added to the Communists steady 23-25 per cent of the electorate had put the Left alliance within striking range of power. The break with socialism ended this prospect for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the Communists were kicked out of hundreds of municipal and provincial governing bodies they had controlled with Socialists, with a loss of local influence and patronage. Soc ialist-Communist alliances still persist in many places, but are gradually succumbing to pressure for dissolution from Socialist national leadership. Prosperity, increasingly, if still insufficiently, diffused, has reduced the depth of the pool of discontent in which the Communists have fished successfully, for votes. Finally the imminence of negotiations to end the Vietnam war has begun to cancel out Communist exploitation of the “peace” Issue.