Europe's Fading Reds

A decade ago, Eurocommunism seemed an idea whose time had come. A new breed of Mediterranean Marxists preached a brand of Communism that renounced revolution, espoused democracy and rejected Soviet domination. Politicians of both the right and left fretted that Eurocommunism was about to transform the political scene. Western observers feared during the 1976 parliamentary election campaign in Italy that the Communists would get enough votes to force the ruling Christian Democrats into the "historic compromise" coalition. The Communists fell just short.

Today, however, the European Communist Parties are almost all in retreat after suffering disastrous setbacks at the polls. Even the Italian Communist Party, still the world's largest nonruling Communist Party, has watched its membership slide from a high of 2 million in the mid-1970s to 1.65 million. . More telling, Bologna is the only large city that still has a Communist mayor. In 1976 there were five, including Rome and Naples. The chances of a party resurgence seem slim under the current leadership of Alessandro Natta, who is bland and unforceful.

In the years following World War II, the French Communists regularly won 20% or more of the vote and dominated a section around Paris known as the Red Belt. But in parliamentary elections in March the Communists got just 9.8% of the vote. French Party Boss Georges Marchais, who polled 15% when he ran for President in 1981, has decided not to run in the 1988 elections.

During the almost 40 years of Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, the underground Communist Party was a symbol and center of opposition. Yet since the return of democracy to Spain in the late '70s, the Communist Party has been on the skids. It captured 23 seats in the 1979 election, but in last month's voting the party, in partnership with a leftist coalition, placed just seven members in the 350-seat lower house of the Cortes. Only Portugal's Communist Party, which never abandoned its allegiance to Moscow, seems to remain strong, consistently hovering around the 19% mark in elections.

Ironically, the shift in tactics that was expected to increase the pull of the Eurocommunists may have been their undoing. As they tried to adopt policies that would appeal to a larger group of leftist voters, the Communists began to look like just another party that would compromise and make back-room deals. In Italy, the party's break with Moscow left voters questioning what kind of program the Communists would put into place. The French Communists' decision to join, then pull out of, a Socialist government had comrades grousing that the alliance had been a tactical mistake.

The Eurocommunists also misread the pulse of a new generation of voters. While they promoted an agenda of disarmament, peace and democracy, they failed to offer voters a concrete program that would tackle the consumer-oriented concerns of the 1980s, such as inflation and unemployment. Says Pierre Hassner, a French expert on Communist affairs: "The Communist Party has become a party of another era. It's old-fashioned, and that's political suicide."

Moreover, voters were moving away from the Communist Parties as they advanced economically. Traditionally, the Communist hard core was built around blue-collar workers. But they are a declining part of the population, and many old Communist workers or their children have gone into white collar jobs and the middle class. France has lost 1.2 million industrial workers since 1975, while it gained 1.5 million in the goods-and-services sector. Today's workers are more likely to be interested in homes and cars than in hammers and sickles.