Communism with a Long Face

The party's mayors have delivered a lot less than they promised

In the piazza in front of Naples' city hall, a group of leftists waved banners and chanted angry slogans, demanding that the mayor take action to give them jobs. "Enough of promises!" they cried. "Give us work!" Inside his office, in a palace that dates back to the last of Naples' Bourbon rulers, Mayor Maurizio Valenzi, 70, was trying to explain his city's problems over the din of the protesters. Valenzi is anything but a Bourbon; he is, in fact, a Communist, one of a score of Communist mayors elected to office in major Italian cities in the party's wave of election victories in 1975 and 1976. Like most of the others, he is decidedly frustrated, because as a group Italy's Communist mayors have been no more successful at solving urban problems than their centrist or right-wing predecessors.

The mayors came to power with lavish promises and high hopes of curing unemployment, housing shortages and a host of other blights that bedevil Italian urban centers. A model government in Bologna, successfully run by Communists since 1945, had inspired millions of voters to believe that the Communists were brilliant city managers. Riding the wave of that single reputation, the party hoped to produce showpiece regimes that would help catapult the Communists to national power by the sheer force of local example.

In practice, however, the newer mayors have proved largely helpless in dealing with the country's deep-rooted economic and social ills, which have only worsened since the Communist Party won 34.1% of the national vote in 1976. Italians who had hoped for instant results, in fact, have been quick to register their disappointment at the polls: earlier this year the party suffered a wrenching loss of four percentage points in the Chamber of Deputies.

Expectations were obviously too high, as Valenzi's Naples shows only too well. Despite the mayor's efforts to build employment, Naples still has the highest proportion of jobless in Italy, 84,000, or 14% of the labor force. While able-bodied men seek jobs, employers farm out work to be done illegally in household sweatshops, where women and children toil for minuscule wages without benefit of social security, labor laws or other protection.

TIME Rome Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn reports that the housing shortage in this city of 1.2 million is so bad (an average 2.8 persons to a room, four to a room in the worst slums) that one newly married couple was forced to live separately, the bride with her parents, the groom with his. The couple found privacy for lovemaking only in their tiny Fiat, parked on a dark street. But even so triumphant a Fiat accompli was rudely interrupted last month by bandits who held up the pair while they were enjoying their cramped privacy.

If Karl Marx were to visit Italy's capital of Rome, he would be undone by what the Romans do under a Communist administration. Communist Mayor Luigi Petroselli, 47, and his Communist predecessor have pushed forward a slum clearance program that has won only the enmity of the city's poor. Instead of being grateful, families that were moved into new apartment buildings in Rome from shantytowns outside the capital complained that they had to pay city taxes and electric bills. Formerly, the shantytown dwellers had obtained free electricity by tapping power lines. They also complained that apartment living made it impossible to keep the kitchen gardens and chicken coops to which they were accustomed. Critics have thus charged the Communists with seeking to impose middle-class solutions to housing problems without regard for the people's lifestyle.

Among the Communist administration's more popular projects has been a vast open-air entertainment festival, dubbed Roman Summer, that has brought the capital concerts and ballroom dancing in public parks. The program has been singularly successful, so much so that it has tended to show up the Communist regime's failures by comparison. Says a former public health service physician: "In a city where mail remains undelivered, garbage litters the streets, schools are infested with lice, and terror and crime stalk the streets, the only thing the Communists gave us is dancing in the park."

By contrast, in the northern industrial center of Turin, Communist Mayor Diego Novelli, 48, has at least solved his city's disastrous schoolroom shortage. In Turin, swollen with immigrant laborers from Italy's south, classrooms were so rare 4% years ago that students had to attend in two and sometimes three shifts. Now all put in a full day. Since 1975 (when Novelli was elected), the city has built 1,159 new classrooms and opened 267 kindergartens and 34 municipal nurseries.

Novelli's biggest single headache is a monstrous migraine: terrorism. As the home of Fiat's giant works, Turin is targeted by the radical left as the stronghold of Italian capitalism. Three weeks ago, still another Fiat official was almost routinely shot in the legs as he walked to his home in a Turin suburb. The "kneecapping" was the city's 124th terrorist attack to take place in 1979. Novelli insists that this pattern of violence "has not interrupted the carrying out of our duties for one hour. We have given Turin a government. In the five years between 1970 and 1975 there had to be seven elections for municipal council. Even so, he acknowledges wearily, "reality has turned out to be far more complex than one could ever imagine in advance."

The failure of these Communist mayors to live up to the voters' expectations could well cost the party Naples, Rome and Turin in next year's local elections, although Novelli has perhaps a slightly better hope of remaining in office. Whatever the outcome, says University of Rome Sociologist Franco Ferrarotti, an independent leftist, "the myth of the Communists' administrative efficiency has been exposed. The Christian Democrats may be corrupt, but they have the experience of government. The Communists are simply not yet equipped to govern."

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