World Notes

Italian Communist Party leader Achille Occhetto barely had time to savor his triumph. At a party congress in Rimini, he won a decisive vote to give the Communists a more moderate identity as the Democratic Party of the Left. Then came the pratfall: the newly named Democrats narrowly failed to re-elect him as party secretary.

Reformers deserted Occhetto when he refused to amend the leftists' hard-line demand that Italy pull its small contingent of naval and air forces out of the gulf war. Although humiliated, Occhetto won his job back late last week with a decisive 69% of the votes. But the incident illustrated how difficult it is proving to remake Western Europe's largest Marxist party. Cracked a rival political leader: "In 1976 the party finally accepted NATO. Today it's against the United Nations."