ITALY: Hammer and Sickle at Half-Mast

Berlinguer's Communists suffer a stunning defeat

In striking contrast to the cheering and dancing of past election nights, the crowd in front of the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) headquarters in Rome was as somber as a cortege. As Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer stepped dejectedly out onto the balcony, there was only a desultory round of applause. His message could not have been less triumphant: Berlinguer acknowledged what he called an "appreciable variation with respect to our exceptional advances of 1976." When someone dutifully unfurled the red hammer-and-sickle flag from the balcony, a disgusted voice piped up loudly from the crowd: "Leave it at half-mast!"

"Appreciable variation" soon became the established party-line euphemism for what was actually a stunning political defeat: the loss of more than a million votes in Italy's national election last week. The setback was a dramatic reversal of the P.C.I.'s successive gains in the regional vote of 1975 and the general election of 1976, which had provoked anxiety in every Western capital about the specter of Eurocommunism coming to power in the NATO alliance. The defeat also raised the prospect of an intraparty challenge to Berlinguer's leadership, since it appeared to be a repudiation of his gradualist "historic compromise" strategy of joining the government in a national alliance with the centrist parties. Said Flaminio Piccoli, president of the Christian Democrats: "The Communist Party has lost its referendum on entering the government."

When all 42 million votes were counted, the Communists had dropped from 34.4% of the popular vote in 1976 to 30.4% and suffered a loss of 26 parliamentary seats. That reduced its strength in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies to 201. It was the first national election setback experienced by the P.C.I, in postwar history. The Christian Democrats, who overconfidently expected to score significant gains, could hardly brag about their own performance. The party that has dominated every Italian government since 1946 slipped fractionally from 38.7% to 38.3% of the popular vote and lost one seat in the lower house for a new total of 262.

Both the major parties thus appeared to have been punished by disaffected supporters for an all-too-cozy parliamentary collaboration that had supported two successive minority Cabinets headed by Christian Democratic Premier Giulio Andreotti. The Socialist Party, the country's third largest, did not fare much better; it gained five new seats for a total of 62 in the Chamber, but failed to make the headway predicted by its vigorous but erratic leader, Bettino Craxi.