Eurocommunism in Defeat

Only two years ago, it was widely feared that the Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain had a real chance of coming to power in tandem with established democratic parties. Loosely united under the rubric of Eurocommunism, these parties shared a set of common principles--autonomy from Moscow, allegiance to the democratic process and support or at least tolerance of the European Community and the NATO Alliance.

In June 1976, at a congress of Eastern and Western European Communist parties in East Berlin, leaders of the three parties flaunted their differences with the Soviet model of socialism, as Leonid Brezhnev stonily looked on.

Flushed with that success, and the Italian party's surge in the 1976 national election, Italy's Enrico Berlinguer, France's Georges Marchais and Spain's Santiago Carrillo celebrated their own heyday at a confident "Eurocommunist summit" in Madrid in March 1977.

With the possible exception of Carrillo, the once-proud leaders of Eurocommunism have been stung by defeat and stymied from making further progress. They are disunited among themselves, and were unable even to settle on common support for the European parliamentary election. The French and Italian parties are wracked by internal struggles that have halted or even reversed their vaunted process of "democratization." And both appear mired in a quandary about what to do next; the two big parties' troubles have left the smaller Spanish party somewhat isolated.

In France, the debacle began when Party Boss Marchais broke with the "Common Program" of the Socialist-Communist coalition, thereby dooming it to defeat in last year's general election. That fateful choice was based on the Communists' decision that they would not take a back seat to the dominant Socialists if the leftist coalition came to power. Marchais concluded that the Socialists would hog the credit for major social and economic reforms, thereby suggesting to workers that they no longer needed the Communists to defend their interests.

As a result, Marchais' French Communist Party, about 700,000 strong, is still ostracized in what French politicians call le ghetto, outside the mainstream of national politics. Increasingly it has reverted to more traditional hard-line postures: it has vehemently opposed the Common Market, revived its loyalty to the Soviet and Eastern European parties, and cracked down on dissent within the party itself.

In Spain, the party led by Carrillo, the boldest of the Eurocommunist bosses, raised its share of the popular vote from 9% to 10% in this year's national election. Since then, Carrillo has become involved in a tenuous opposition alliance with the far more popular Socialist Party. It is generally thought that the Communists, with 100,000 or so members, are blocked from sharing in national power by popular fears of a dangerous right-wing reaction.

The future fortunes of Eurocommunism are likely to depend on the lead of the 1.7 million-member Italian party, which started it all in 1973 when Berlinguer launched his strategy of the "historic compromise." There is general agreement that the P.C.I, is entering a prolonged period of soul searching and internal debate. The main lines of the struggle are expected to be drawn between the hard-line left wing of the party, which has never been comfortable with Berlinguer's gradualism, and members of his own right wing who have argued for even more moderation.

"There is bound to be a profound debate on the identity of the party itself and on the whole idea of Eurocommunism," says Arrigo Levi, former editor of Turin's La Stampa. "Did it go too far or not far enough? The left wing will say we have to be more strongly 'Communist' in order not to lose more ground on our left. The right wing will say we have to recover more of the floating vote from the center and therefore we have to become more social-democratic." The outcome of the debate may well determine whether Eurocommunism remains a plausible strategy for the flagging Communist parties of the West.

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