Communists and Crisis

Berlinguer 's party stands poised for a dreaded role in government

The sounds and signals were only too familiar: scare headlines screaming from the Italian newspapers, angry demonstrators on the march, and the spectacle of grim-faced political leaders huddling long into the night. Yet the storm gathering force last week in Italy was more ominous than any of the change-of-government crises that have preceded it--on the average of one every ten months since 1946. Amid the worst violence to erupt in the country in five years, the 18-month-old minority government of Premier Giulio Andreotti, faltering for weeks, slid toward all but certain collapse. Andreotti was expected to submit his resignation to President Giovanni Leone early this week, thus setting the stage for the moment that democratic governments around the world have long dreaded. For the first time since 1947, the powerful Communist Party of Italy, led by Secretary-General Enrico Berlinguer, stood poised to assume a decisive role in the government.

The prospect so alarmed President Jimmy Carter that he recalled U.S. Ambassador Richard N. Gardner from Rome for consultations. For weeks, Gardner had been sending increasingly urgent cables warning of the deteriorating Italian situation. In Washington, in talks with Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gardner emphasized his worry that the Administration's low-key approach to Eurocommunism--a stance he himself had urged--had left some Italian politicians with the mistaken impression that the U.S. did not care.

The upshot was a stern warning from the State Department. "Recent developments in Italy," said State, "have increased the level of our concern. Our position is clear: we do not favor [Communist participation in government] and would like to see Communist influence in any Western European country reduced. The U.S. and Italy share profound democratic values and interests, and we do not believe that the Communists share those values and interests." That kind of language, while several decibels below the threatening warnings of Henry Kissinger, nonetheless marked a new high point of concern by the Carter Administration on the subject of Eurocommunism.

The crisis in Andreotti's fragile government had been brewing since early December. Public impatience with its failure to reverse deepening unemployment and to solve other economic troubles was sharpened by a growing despair over an epidemic of violence. Then came a sudden eruption of new bloodshed. The troubles began over the long Epiphany weekend, when a team of six extremists, presumedly leftwing, pounced on a neighborhood headquarters of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (M.S.I.) on Rome's outskirts and assassinated two young people. In rioting that followed, another young M.S.I, member was killed in a clash with carabinieri.

In furious revenge, rightist youths rampaged through the district, overturning and burning parked cars, fire-bombing the house of a daily newspaper editor, and ransacking a suburban Communist Party cell headquarters. Guerrilla warfare spilled into the streets almost nightly. In the Alberone district near the Appian Way, police had to make repeated baton charges to break up a march of young ultraleftists who were determined to defy the city's ban against demonstrations. Simultaneously, half a mile away in the Tuscolano district, a contingent of carabinieri in gray combat gear had to use five armored vehicles to end an hour-long shooting spree by young rightists armed with automatic pistols.

Through this week-long nightmare, Andreotti's minority Christian Democratic Cabinet--never strong but unusually durable by recent Italian standards --was moribund. The government had managed to survive only because of a six-party "programmatic accord" negotiated last summer. The agreement gave the five nonruling parties a powerful voice in shaping a number of major domestic policies. In return, they supported the government's specific legislation by abstaining on parliamentary votes. Berlinguer's Communists were the key partners.

The accord began to dissolve two months ago, when Andreotti had to face the grim requirements of this year's national budget. Badgered by the International Monetary Fund to contain spending in .return for a $530 million loan last spring, yet besieged by the nation's unions for more pump-priming public investment, the Premier fashioned a budget that tried to cover both bases. He proposed austerity measures raising transport, telephone and electricity rates, together with "selective" investments to stimulate the economy. The package pleased no one. It was more than $10 billion above the spending target set by Italy's IMF watchdogs, and woefully short of what the unions wanted. Angrily, 150,000 demonstrators marched on Rome in December, and labor leaders threatened a general strike for this week--now called off in the face of the expected government fall.

Fearing further labor unrest, four of the parties to the accord publicly abandoned the agreement. Three of them demanded a direct role for the Communists in the government. The small but active left-of-center Republicans bolted first, announcing that they would vote against the budget and pull their 14 votes into opposition in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. The restive Socialists (57 seats) were the next to defect. Though stopping short of joining the opposition, they renewed an earlier call for an "emergency" government that would include active Communist participation. The Communists themselves, who hold 228 seats, finally entered the confrontation in mid-December, when Party Boss Berlinguer, in a television interview, dramatically called for "a government of democratic solidarity." In the face of Italy's "grave and worsening crisis," he argued, the country needed "a formula that would equally commit the Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats."

The various calls for Communist participation were not exactly signs of a sudden fraternal interparty amity in Italy. The Republicans argued that unless Berlinguer's soft-line Communism was given a direct voice in government, it might swiftly be replaced with a hard-line Marxist-Leninist brand. The Socialists, who have lost considerable ground to the Communists in recent years, wanted to stress their own sympathy for union militants and also to get the Communists on the voting record on issues they have avoided.

As for the Communist Party, Berlinguer and his fellow leaders had been under increasing pressure for nearly a year from rank-and-file members and far-left students who accused them of collaborating with Italy's Establishment. In past years the Communists were content to stay in the shadows; they remembered the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, and they feared a similar polarization and result in Italy if the left tried to take power by itself. But the economic and social crisis accelerated their drive. The Communists were convinced that they had to show some progress in their promised constitutional climb toward power. As one senior Communist Deputy explained to TIME Rome Bureau Chief Jordan Bonfante, "A party as big as ours cannot afford to stand still indefinitely."

The Christian Democrats were sorely divided about how to respond to the new demands. Andreotti offered to renegotiate a new "programmatic accord" and invited experts of the other parties to help draft an alternative economic program. Some Christian Democrats seemed willing to let the Communists have a positive role as members of an "emergency majority" --that is, as voting members of the majority, without the Cabinet posts of an "emergency government." But Andreotti's right-wing Deputies vetoed that idea. After a series of stormy meetings last week, the Christian Democrats' 30-man directorate issued a predictable but disappointing offer, holding out the possibility of a new accord but firmly rejecting Communist participation in the government and apparently ruling out even an active part in the legislative majority.

Though many Christian Democrats were apparently encouraged by the Carter Administration's explicit disapproval of a strengthened Communist role, some thought the statement provocative enough to disown it. Said Foreign Minister Arnaldo Forlani: "These things have never helped to disentangle our situation." The

Communists were infuriated. The party newspaper, L'Unita, denounced the statement as "heavy interference by the U.S. in the Italian political crisis." The Spanish Communist Party issued a sweeping condemnation, accusing the U.S. of "trying to block the rise of a free and independent Europe." In fact, the U.S. declaration pointedly repeated the Administration's position that its allies are "sovereign countries and the decision on how they are governed rests with them alone." One American policymaker explained that the U.S. was merely re-emphasizing a long-held position as a needed reminder in the changed circumstances of the Italian crisis. Returning to Italy, U.S. Ambassador Gardner crisply defended the action: "There is only one superpower that has a doctrine of limited sovereignty, and that power is not the United States."

The refusal of the Christian Democrats to yield on increased Communist participation prompted the Communists in turn to stiffen their own stance. Declared one party policymaker testily: "For 30 years all the governments in this country have been based on the prejudice that the Communist Party is somehow a B-league party capable of everything except governing. But the galloping crisis now demonstrates that still another government based on that prejudice would be insufficient, to say the least."

If the two major parties do fail to find any new modus vivendi after Andreotti's expected resignation, the only option is early elections. The prospect, risky as it might be, did not bother many Christian Democrats as much as the step-by-inexorable-step Communist advance on power. But elections would doubtless be a trauma that neither Communist nor Christian Democrat would savor right away, and there are likely to be weeks of painful maneuvering and countermaneu-vering before they are willing to face that drastic ultimate step. In the meantime, the violent voices resounding through the streets of Italy can be counted on to add their own strident note of urgency.

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