The Low-Profile Communists

When the workers' riots erupted in Poland, some of the loudest denunciations of the Communist bosses in Warsaw came from party spokesmen in Western Europe--most notably from the Red leaders of Italy's Emilia-Romagna region. Guido Fanti, the Communist president of the region, rose before his 50-member council to deplore "the tragic events of Poland." The Communist mayor of Bologna, Renato Zangheri, expressed "the strongest condemnation of the use of arms" to suppress the revolt.

It was, in a way, no great surprise that the Italian Communists should be so quick to criticize the errors of their Polish comrades; they are a rather special breed. Emilia-Romagna is one of 15 Italian regions that last June elected semiautonomous governments under a nationwide decentralization program --and the only one in which the Communists and their allies won a majority. Rather than use their new-found power to try to cast the region along orthodox Marxist lines, the Emilia-Romagna Communists--who have been the dominant political force in the so-called "red belt" of central Italy since World War II--have chosen instead to make it a showcase for good government. Keeping a very low profile indeed, the Communists seem shrewdly determined to prove that all of Italy, and not just Emilia-Romagna, would be better off Red than almost anything else.

In building their showcase, the Communists skillfully capitalized on the region's natural advantages. Emilia-Romagna has long been Italy's richest agricultural region. For the past 20 years, it has led the nation in industrial growth; thanks to an influx of new plants and fat payrolls, the per capita income in Bologna (more than $1,600 a year) is rising at a rate of better than 9% a year. Businessmen find that it is one place where they can count on local Communist politicians to keep obstreperous left-wing labor unions in line.

Party officials not only court industrialists, but also the ordinary citizen --in refreshing contrast to the usual Italian practice. For small businessmen, the Communists have slashed bureaucratic red tape. For farmers, they have set up cooperatives that take care of everything from buying their machinery to marketing their produce, which includes 80% of the world's supply of Parmesan cheese. New arrivals from the poverty-stricken south always find a party representative on hand at the railroad station or bus depot to point the way to a job, to housing or to party-run community centers with cut-rate bars and restaurants. Many of Italy's beaches are open sewers, but in Rimini, on Emilia-Romagna's Adriatic coast, swimmers enjoy waters kept clean by modern antipollution equipment.

The results of Communist rule are not all on the plus side. Personal corruption of minor officials is less obtrusive than in other regions, but the party and its faithful have won themselves positions of high privilege--and profit. Much of the profit from the hundreds of Communist-run stores, building firms and other cooperatives in the region's eight provinces flows first into the coffers of the party and its myriad youth groups, women's auxiliaries and other fronts, and then into the pockets of the legions of hacks and functionless functionaries on party payrolls.

To promote their avidly sought democratic image, the Communists of Emilia-Romagna not only twit their comrades in other countries, they go out of their way to downplay their own presence. Although more than 400,000 of Italy's 1,492,000 card-carrying party members live in the region, President Fanti scoffs at Christian Democratic fears that the Reds intend to build a Moscow-style monolithic state. All the Communists want, he says soothingly, is a society "which is pluralistic, in which no ideology or faith would have an exclusive or privileged position."

People's Pollock. Probably the best exponent of Italy's low-profile brand of Communism is Bologna's Mayor Renato Zangheri, a party "liberal," economist and intellectual who is regarded as something of a Marxist Medici even by nonCommunists. Since July, when he became the latest Red mayor of Bologna, Zangheri has insisted on keeping his University of Bologna professorship, on wearing his academic tweeds, and on making over much of the municipal government in his eclectic but thoughtful style. Among the 17th century frescoes in the Palazzo D'Accursio, he has hung a favorite Jackson Pollock and other moderns. As for the city itself, he has divided it into 18 quartieri, each with its own deputy mayor, council and library. Zangheri believes that "when a city becomes a giant metropolis, it is ungovernable." His solution: stop growing. When the population of Bologna, now 480,000, approaches 600,000, he will simply sign no more building permits.

Zangheri's heresies--he regularly chews out the Soviets for suppressing intellectual freedom--might leave voters confused about whether he is really a Communist at all. But it hardly matters; on ballots, the party identifies itself as the Two Towers, after a Bologna landmark. The word "Communist" never even appears.

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