Italian Communist Party leader dies

Press, 13 June 1984, Page 11

Italian Communist Party leader dies

NZPA-AFP Rome The leader of Western Europe’s biggest Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer, died in Padua on Sunday, aged 62, after suffering 'a brain haemorrhage at a political meeting last Thursday. Mr Berlinguer, who became Secretary-General of the Italian Communist Party in 1972, blazed the trail for Euro-Communism by moving away from the Communist line laid down by Moscow.

In 1973, he entered into alliance with the Christian Democrats forming what was termed the “historic compromise” between Catholics and Marxists. The son of a Sardinian family of noble ancestry, and often called the red marquis, Mr Berlinguer brought ideas of “Socialism in freedom” to the party and launched major debates with the French and Spanish Communist parties on the “open” doctrines of Eurocommunism. He often repeated, “we cannot build a lasting Socialism with 51 per cent of the vote,” in explanation of the alliance of the party’s 34.4 per cent during the 1970 s with the Christian Democrats’ 38.7 per cent of the electorate. Mr Berlinguer attacked the Kremlin’s record on human rights, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Communist line in Poland. But the compromise with the Catholics collapsed after the murder of the Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, in 1978 by Red Brigade terrorists.

Recently the Communist Party strongly opposed its former Christian Democratic partner and moved closer to the Socialist Party.

But the Socialist leader, Bettino Craxi, preferred to look to the Centre-Left for support and the Communists were isolated as their vote declined to 29.9 per cent of the electorate.

Mr Berlinguer had recently reinforced the party’s bitter opposition to the present coalition Government led by Mr Craxi, particularly because of its strict anti-inflation policies. Mr Berlinguer suffered a stroke while speaking at a campaign rally in Padua for the June 17 European elections in which he hoped the Communists would become the major Italian political party ahead of the Christian Democrats.

A Communist official for the Veneto region said he did not think the campaign would suffer. “We are in the last few days now and the battles have already been

fought,” he told Reuters. A meeting of the 31member party directorate was scheduled for today but officials said they doubted that Berlinguer’s successor would be named until after the European poll.

The 146-member central committee will have to convene to elect a new General Secretary for the party which has never before been left leaderless with no heirapparent in the wings. Mr Berlinguer joined the party in 1944 and was on the Central Committee a year later. He climbed up the party ranks and was elected a deputy in Rome in 1968 and a member of the European Parliament in 1978. Close friends said he led an austere private life, married to a practising Catholic with four children whom he jealously protected from the glare of publicity. “Always act with rectitude in everything you do in life, so others can say of you ‘there is a Communist’,” Mr Berlinguer liked to say.