Italy: Why Communism Hangs On: The Comrades Are Middle Class

The record of Bologna's Mayor Giuseppe Dozza, 63, reads as though it came out of a good-government primer. In four successive terms, he has stood for fiscal responsibility, a balanced budget and incentives for industry. He is campaigning for a fifth term this week on a platform of lower taxes, lower living costs and better breaks for small businessmen. He has raised Bologna's credit so high that a consortium of banks recently offered the city an $18 million loan. Even his enemies concede that Dozza is both honest and efficient. In fact, the only unorthodox thing about him is that he is a Communist.

His clean, competent administration of Bologna, a city of half a million people on the edge of the Po Valley, is a classic example of why non-Communists find it so hard to break the Red grip on so many Italian cities and towns. In next week's municipal elections, 6,724 communities will vote for local officials, and sharp Communist gains could bring down the virtually paralyzed center-left coalition government of the Christian Democrats and Socialists. While Italy is beset by inflation and strikes, the coalition parties are campaigning largely on the argument that Communists are Communists, one using Khrushchev's ouster to underline the point; the Christian Democrats even put up portraits of Khrushchev, Malenkov, Stalin and Mao right in Rome's Via Veneto to recall the jungle warfare in the Red world. The Communists counter by sticking to Italian economic issues and by pointing to Mayor Dozza and the rinnovatori (modernizers) elsewhere to show that Communism has indeed changed.

Shaky Church. In Dozza's pre-election pamphlet, What We Have Done, the word Communist appears only once in 63 pages. Dozza and his comrades are called the Gruppo Due Torri (the Two Towers Group), a reference to the pair of medieval leaning towers in the city's center which are the symbol of Bologna. Red election posters in the parks and piazzas are similarly bare of the hammer and sickle, and read: VOTA DUE TORRI!

Stocky, amiable Mayor Dozza has been remarkably successful in abandoning the conventional class struggle and winning over the middle class. He had organized 3,000 shop owners and storekeepers into a merchants' federation, and helped them fight against supermarket and chain-store competition. His public officials have been well trained in Communist administration schools, and are qualified for their jobs; each is screened for personal honesty.

Dozza thrives on paradox. When Bologna's Giacomo Cardinal Lercaro ordered the shaky old church of San Giorgio torn down, it was Dozza who insisted on repairs to preserve it as an historic landmark. In 1956, when a Christian Democratic candidate for mayor tried to undercut Dozza by promising sweeping social-welfare programs, the Red mayor branded his scheme financially irresponsible, and was re-elected by a landslide.