ITALY: Communists and Crisis

• Share

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.