The Communists: A Step Closer to Power

At the austere sandstone palazzo that houses Communist Party headquarters on Rome's Street of the Dark Shops, open telephone lines crackled as apparatchiks from Milan to Catania called in excitedly with the latest tallies. Over the party's closed-circuit television network, a bearded youth in shirtsleeves and a sleek blonde in a denim jacket broadcast the figures and forecast results.

Even before the final totals rolled in from Italy's first regional elections in five years, Communist leaders were agape at what they were seeing. In contests for 15 of Italy's 20 regional governments, 86 of its 95 provinces and 6,347 of its 8,065 cities and towns, the Communists made stunning inroads. They captured the Liguria region, embracing Genoa and the Italian Riviera, to go along with the three regions they already controlled in the Communist "Red Belt"--Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria. They out polled the long-entrenched Christian Democrats in the Marches on the Adriatic as well as in the Piedmont. They won the industrial powerhouses of Milan and Turin, as well as Naples and Venice.

Compared with the 1972 national elections, the Communists increased their share of the vote by 5.1%, to 33.4%. The Christian Democrats, with every other party trying to wrench votes away from their centrist support, lost 309,843 votes. They were down 3.1%, to 35.3%, dangerously close to the 35% that represented an "alarm line" for Christian Democratic Boss Amintore Fanfani. All together, the Communists trailed the Christian Democrats by fewer than 600,000 votes. Their total vote, 10.1 million, was the largest ever cast for a Communist party in the West.

Outside party headquarters, a crowd of youthful supporters cheered wildly when Secretary-General Enrico Berlinguer, 53, the spare, introspective Sardinian who masterminded the unexpected showing, appeared on a floodlit balcony. Later, looking across a sea of red flags at a mass rally of 200,000 Communists in the Piazza of St. John Lateran, Berlinguer declared, "The political line of the Italian Communist Party promises the only valid democratic alternative to reactivate Italy. The gains of the Communist Party can only frighten the corrupt and the overbearing. They cannot frighten honest citizens."

Test of Sentiment. Because the voting was regional rather than national, it had no direct relationship to the makeup of Parliament. Nor did it immediately affect Italy's national government, a rickety coalition of Christian Democrats and Republicans, with Socialist support. Nonetheless, as the first balloting since 1972, the election was a significant barometer of the national mood. More than that, it was a test of sentiment concerning Berlinguer's proposed "historic compromise," under which the Communists would share power with the Christian Democrats, who for 30 uninterrupted years have run the country. Evidently, an impressive number of Italians felt they had run it right into the ground.*

The outcome alarmed partisans of democracy and NATO strategists, who are already concerned about Portugal's continuing drift toward left-wing authoritarianism (see following story). When added to NATO's uncertainty over the future roles of Greece and Turkey as a result of the Cyprus crisis, the Italian vote portended troubles for the alliance's whole southern tier.

In Italy, the "Black Tuesday" following the two-day election saw the Milan stock market record its largest single-day drop since a government collapse coincided with a slumping market 15 years ago. Gianni Agnelli, chairman of Italy's giant Fiat automotive empire, warned that the results would "push us farther away from the Western world." Speculators sold the lira short. Moviemakers, many of whom are radical chic Communist voters, fretted that Western cinemoney would dry up.

The rest of the West took the election returns more calmly--less as a Communist triumph than as a defeat for the Christian Democrats, who have grown flabby, inefficient, corrupt and arrogant. Both Washington and London stressed that voters in Western Europe tend to cross lines in regional contests as a means of registering protests, much as American voters do in primaries. Europeans were more sanguine than the U.S. about the respectability and acceptability of Italian Communists. Some British politicians even suggested that a Tito-style Communist Party in Italy would be more of an embarrassment than an asset to the Kremlin.

The Christian Democrats knew long before election day that they were in trouble. Italy's economic miracle had run out of steam. Soaring consumer prices led to bloated wage demands and a rash of strikes. Public services were so badly administered that they were cynically called "public disservices." Unemployment rose to 5.7%, a high figure for Italy. Austerity policies at home (including unpopular higher taxes) brought about a dramatic improvement

* Since Italy's 1963 "opening to the left," the Christian Democrats have maintained power as dominant partners in a series of coalition Cabinets involving Republicans, Social Democrats and Socialists. The small reformist Republican Party is particularly interested in fiscal conservatism. The Social Democrats are vigorously anti-Communist and pro-Europe. The Socialists are continually torn between an ideological affinity with the Communists, their pro-Western loyalties and pork-barrel reasons for remaining in government.

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