The Italian Communists: Internationalisms Old and New

THE ITALIAN COMMUNISTS: INTERNATIONALISMS OLD AND NEW Patrick McCarthy Wh hen the Italian Communist party (PCI) selected Achille Occhetto to be its general secretary inJune 1988, it appeared to be in an "inevitable decline."1 Just one year later, however, in the June 18, 1989, European Parliament elections the PCI won 27.6 percent of the vote, 1 percent more than in the 1987 Italian legislative elections and its best result in years. While it is too soon to decide whether the decline has been reversed, halted, or merely slowed, this is a good moment to assess the PCI and its future. A thorough analysis of the Italian Communist party would consider its domestic policies, its place in the Italian political system, intra-party issues, and its bid to present itself not as a part of the communist world but as a democratic, West European left-wing party. For reasons ofspace, only the fourth aspect will be considered, with the first three mentioned in so far as they overlap with it. The problem of internationalism is all the more important because theJune 18 elections took place two weeks after the massacre of the Chinese students in Beijing and against the background of newspaper headlines about "The End of Communism" and "The Red Desert."2 While 1.Alberto Ronchey, "Un declino inevitabile," La Repubblica, June 1, 1989. 2.Panorama, June 18, 1989. Patrick McCarthy is professor of European studies at SAIS Bologna Center. He recently edited The French Socialists in Power (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), and is working on a book on the Italian Communists in the 1980s. The research for this article was carried out at the Instituto Gramsci in Bologna, Italy. The author wishes to thank the staff for their kind help. 163 164 SAIS REVIEW the PCI has not won acceptance as a Western party like the German Social Democrats or the French Socialists, it has survived "the end of communism " because it has ceased to be a part of communism. To see how this occurred, one must analyze the PCI that Occhetto inherited and the impact he has made. Occhetto's First Year "Is the party over?" was the title of a 1988 Time article on the Italian Communist party.3 It expressed what many Italians, Communist and non-Communist, were wondering. In 1976, the PCI had won 34.4 percent of the vote, and for the next three years served in a government coalition. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the party consistently received 30 percent of the vote. Then in 1987, its support plunged to 26.6 percent , a sharp drop according to the arithmetic of Italian elections. Scattered local elections in May 1988 showed another 4 percent drop, to 22.8 percent. June saw a plunge in the Friuli regional elections in which the PCI received 17.8 percent of the vote, down from 21.7 percent five years earlier. Meanwhile, support for the Italian Socialist party (PSI) jumped to 17.5 percent from 11.3 percent in 1983. The reasons seemed obvious. The non-Communist left had defeated the Communists in all other West European countries, and now the "Italian anomaly" would be ended. World communism was in crisis, and the PCI would be dragged down with it. Italian Communists too were gloomy: "Our ideas, our models and our myths were worn out by the late 1970s," said one spokesman. "We are literally in a time of make-orbreak ," said another.4 A mildly sympathetic journalist wrote, "It is less and less clear what the PCI wants and what it wants to be."5 Financial problems grew— the party had a deficit of around $20 million— and membership dropped. In its stronghold of Turin, the number of PCI members plunged from 47,000 members in 1976 to 29,000 in 1989. Leadership was another part of the problem, and even before the June 1988 Friuli elections the party secretary, Alessandro Natta, was replaced by Occhetto, who chose as his slogan "discontinuity," a heretical term for traditional Communists. Flanked by a young and eminently unideological ruling group, Achille Occhetto announced the abandonment of the communist dream of a completely different society — there...