The People's Choice

Returns from Europe's 1945 elections were in. To examine them was to look on the face of a friend returned from a long and painful journey. What the Continent had endured and learned in the past six years--and in the 20 years preceding 1939--was written on the ballots.

This much was plain: 1) the old Right was smashed; 2) the old Left had not triumphed; 3) the Center, despised and declining between the wars, had mightily revived; it had succeeded the Right and at the same time had cut deeply into the Left's popular support.

At the end of World War I the Russian revolution posed a dilemma which both the revolutionists and their bitterest enemies held inescapable: the Extreme Right or the Extreme Left. For two decades of mounting political violence, Europe's people, most of whom wanted neither extreme, were drawn, duped or beaten toward one or the other.

The end of World War II brought at least a temporary escape from extremism. Wherever the people were free to choose, an amazing number voted against the old parties, the old leaders, the old notions that only the Right could protect them against the Left and only the Left could protect them against the Right.

Clearest example of the new trend was the size of Georges Bidault's brand-new Mouvement Republicain Populaire in France. Its moderate progressivism attracted both Breton fisherfolk and Parisian shopkeepers. The strong religious base of the M.R.P. was not the prewar political Catholic group, which descended from the Royalist, anti-Dreyfusard reactionaries; the M.R.P. drew its ideology from the liberal social justice encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI. In economics it was left of the U.S. New Deal; but in political outlook it had much in common with Thomas Jefferson.

In Austria, Luxemburg and Hungary, election results showed tremendous new vitality in parties akin to M.R.P. In Norway and Denmark similar groups, with a Lutheran instead of a Catholic background, also showed gains. In Italy, although no election had been held, the same strengthening of the center was registered by the choice of Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi to form a new Cabinet.

The old extremes still dominated Europe's geographical edges. Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal were the precarious remnants of the Right. Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania, all in the Russian sphere, had held elections on the one-slate Moscow model, and produced the expected results. But in most of the rest of Europe the Communists, aware that their day had not come, played a cagey game.

In sum: Europe's plain people were trying to find a 20th-century way of expressing Europe's peculiar contribution to civilization--the dignity and worth of the individual man.

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