Setback for the CP in local elections The May 12 and 13 elections were important for three reasons. First of all, they were to determine the fate of a series of regional and provincial councils, as well as of city governments where left coalitions have ruled for ten years. A number of these went into crisis as a result of the defection of the Socialist Party (PSI), which opted for alliances with the centrist parties.
Secondly, these elections would test whether the five-party coalition of the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, and the small Social Democratic Party (PSDI), Republican Party (PRI), and Liberal Party (PLI) that rules the country was losing momentum electorally. This bloc has been continually rent by internal conflicts and has been defeated several times on parliamentary votes.
Thirdly, a lot of political attention was focused on the question of whether the Communist Party (PCI) would top the vote of the Christian Democrats for the second time. It passed this milestone first in the 1984 European elections.
The LCR, Italian section of the Fourth International, was represented on the DP slates and contributed to the good results they achieved. In some cases, its support proved decisive in gaining seats. (this could be seen by the preference votes cast for some of the candidates). Three LCR members wete elected to city councils (two in Vicorato near Rome and one in Spezzano in Calabria) and three were elected to ward councils, (Venice, Brescia and Livomo). (1)
The Greens made their first relatively large-scale appearance, although this took widely differing forms. In part, for example, they identified with representatives of the Radical Party. Their average score, 1.7% was relatively modest. But they did not run everywhere, and in those areas where they did present candidates they got 2.6%. If the Greens continue to run in elections, they can pose some problems for the Radical Party, as well as for the DP, the PSI, and the PCI.
However, the most important aspect of the May 12 elections was unquestionably the decline of the PCI, whose vote dropped by 4.3%, a very big change in the context of stable Italian voting patterns, from the level of the European elections.
In particular, the PCI was beaten in the big cities where it had gotten spectacular results since 1975 and even in working-class and poor neighborhoods and wards. Now it will be frozen out of the city council in Turin and Rome and very likely in Milan. The situation remains quite uncertain in Genoa and Venice.
Only in the traditionally red regions (Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria) did the PCI hold its strength. But even there it lost its momentum.
The PCI's decline was all the more grave because, as I noted, it did not correspond to a rise in abstentions, nor did the votes it lost shift toward the DP, except possibly in the most marginal way. It is not easy to plot exactly the shifts in the vote. But according to the PCI electoral department, by comparison with the 1983 elections, the party gained from the drop in abstentions and spoiled or blank ballots, while losing votes to the PSI, the Greens, and the DP.
Both the DP and the Greens gained only in the region of 0.2% (the study does not distinguish between those votes that went to the Greens and those that went to the DP).
Discussion has opened up, including in the PCI itself, about the reasons for what the party organ, l'Unita, called in 'its first comment "a severe blow." There 1. It has to be noted, however, that in Spezzano, the LCR was on a slate under a different name than that of the DP. and in Vicovaro, because of the refusal of the local DP to apply the national agreement correctly. the LCR made an agreement with the PCI (which, for its part, got three seats). The wards are subdivisions of the boroughs in the big cities.
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Livio MAITAN
The results were clear enough, and for once the winners and the losers did not have too many differences over the assessment of the vote. The following table (table 1) shows the overall results in the regional elections, which were politically the most significant.
Obviously in assessing the vote shifts, you have to take into consideration the type of election. Some voters make different choices depending on the nature of the elections. It has to be noted, for example, that on May 12, the PCI got 30.2% in the regional elections, while it got only 29.9% in the provincial elections, and 27.6% in the municipal ones. On the other hand, in the city of Bologna its vote declined more in the regional elections than in the municipal elections. Nonetheless, the general tendencies emerge quite clearly, and overall the general political motivations have a greater weight than local ones.
Thus, it is more useful to compare the latest results with those of 1983 and even with 1984 than those with more remote ones of 1980. It has to be taken into consideration, moreover, that the percentage of abstention dropped, and that most often there was a coincidence between variations in percentage and in absolute figures, which makes it possible to draw conclusions with a greater certainty.
So, what conclusions should be drawn? The DC scored definite gains this time both with respect to 1983 and 1984, and this time it has topped the PCI. The PSI also made progress, getting its best result since 1968 (among other things, it gained from the fact that the Radicals [a protest party] did not run a slate). The other parties of the tational Viewpoint 3 June 1985 government coalition got uneven results, in general more favorable in the case of the PRI than in that of the PSDI and the PLI.
In other words, the DC consolidated itself as the strongest force in the ruling coalition and the PSI as its main ally. The latter can exploit its position in the government to play a role out of proportion to its electoral strength.
The PSI's margin for maneuver is still greater at the local level. In fact, it will be able to sit in most local executive bodies, taking advantage of the relationship of forces to gain inclusion both in left administrations and those run by centrist coalitions.
What is more, the five-party governmental coalition has unquestionably come out of these elections stronger, and it can now seriously envisage remaining in office until the term of the present legislature ends in 1988 (which does not exclude shifts in the composition of the government).
The MSI, in general, maintained its positions. But the national average is the sum of quite different regional tendencies. It declined or stagnated in the center and the south, but it gained in the north. In the city of Bolzano, the capital of a province in which the majority of the people are German speaking and where the national question thus remains acutely posed, the MSI gained a plurality.
The DP gained, .0.1% by comparison with the European elections and notably more, 0.6% by comparison with the 1980 regional elections, but it did not exceed the level of the 1983 legislative elections. Nonetheless, it can now play more of a role in the regional councils, where it will have nine representatives. In 1980, it got three seats.
TABLE 1
1985 regional elections
1984 European
1980 regional elections
1983 legislative
Votes PCI 9,686,140 30.2 PDUP DC 11,223,284 35.0 PSI 4,267,959 13.3 PSDI 1,150,788 3.6 PRI 1,280,563 4.0 PRI-PLI coalition PLI 702,273 2.2 DP 470,626 1.5 PR Greens 553,353 1.7 MSI 2,087,404 6.5 miss. 608,724 2.0 Total 32,031,114
Seats
225
276
94
23
25
13
9
9
41
5
720
Votes
9,574,077
363,012
11,154,807
3,851,978
1,506,649
924,347
818,250
274,911
1,787,395
95,527
30,350,953
% Seats Votes % Votes % 31.5 233 9,863,564 31.2 10,359,829 34.5 1.2 8 36.8 290 10,228,994 32.6 9,907,043 33.0 12.7 86 3,608,282 11.4 3,397,026 11.3 5.0 30 1,277,345 4.0 1,008,482 3.4 3.0 18 1,635,029 5.2
1,845,861 6.2 2.7 15 935,455 3 0.9 3 471,450 1.5 429,267 1.4
722,380 2.3 969,949 3.2 5.9 37 2,088,115 6.6 1,886,987 6.3 0.3 682,752 2.2 196,095 0.7
31,573,366 29,999,639
Abbreviations: PCI, Communist party;
PSI, Socialist Party; PDUP, Party of Proletarian Unity, the Il Manifesto group; PSDI,
Tan ane vam da pp H Rubican Partu a small bourgeois partv; PLI.
Democratic Socialist Party, an old right-wing split from the PSI: PRI, Italian Republican Party,
Italian Liberal Party, small right-wing bourgeois party; DC, Christian Democrats; MSI, Italian Social Movement, ultrarightist with neofascist connections; DP, Proletarian Democracy, far-left slate.
were no doubt various factors. In the cities it had run for long years, in particular Rome and Turin, the PCI found its credibility wearing out. This was because of its yielding to all sorts of blackmail from its allies and the government and because it chose not to put up a fight, by mobilizing the masses, against the constraints imposed by the state. The PCI did not even respond with the necessary energy to the operations that led to its exclusion from the governments of cities such as Turin and Florence. In the conditions of a continuing economic crisis, the PCI seemed to a section of the voters incapable of solving such acute problems as housing and transport. But what lay above all at the root of this setback were general political and social factors.
In 1983 and still more in the initial months of 1984, massive social and political struggles developed, culminating in the gigantic demonstration on March 24. The PCI played an indisputable role in this. Even Berlinguer's funeral fitted into this context. Above and beyond being homage to a popular leader who died suddenly, it was an enormous and extremely militant political mobilization. The PCI's surpassing the vote of the DC on March 24 reflected all that.
The period that began in June 1984 has, however, been marked by a decline in mobilization and political tension. The level of struggle has been the lowest in the whole postwar period. The PCI, which had tried to channel the movement, helped to demobilize it. At the same time, it played a decisive role in role in paralyzing the peace movement.
In such a context, all the economic and social difficulties arising from unemployment, economic stagnation, and so on, began to weigh negatively on the political situation itself. And the conservative ideological offensive which the vative ideological oftensive wien une
6 workers' movement and the PCI in particular have proved incapable of responding to with any seriousness, sowed disarray and provoked a retreat of some sections of the masses, which bourgeois parties, especially, the DC, were able to recapture. It is significant, among other things, that for the first time in long years the Church actively mobilized against the PCI.
It would be wrong to draw sweeping negative conclusions from this. The situation in Italy remains unstable, both on the social and political levels, and the workers: movement still has the necessary strength to meet the offensive of its adversary, even to begin a counter-attack.
The campaign for the referendum to be held on June 9 is an initial opportunity for a fight back. (2) This campaign has to be fought and won, combating all hesitations and maneuvers. The LCR threw itself into this work right after the project was launched on December 12.
Finally, the electoral setback has provoked very sharp debates and public Italian Workers demonstrate (DR)
differences in the PCI. On one side, Senator Napoleone Colajanni plunged into an open criticism of the party's present organization from a more rightwing point of view.
He has gone so far as to recommend the replacement of the party national secretary, Natta, by the union leader, Lama. (The latter has decided to withdraw from the leadership of the CGIL [Italian General Confederation of Labor] at the congress that is to be held in a few months.)
It is obvious that Colajanni would never have made such a statement without the agreement of other leaders higher up than he.
Other PCI leaders struck a different sort of note already during the election campaign (for example, in Rome the former CGIL leader Scheda). As for the PCI youth organization, the FGCI, its secretary gave an interview to the daily Paese Sera, which has become the forum for elements critical of the party's present orientation. Among other things he said that the party's losses had to be attributed to the ineffectiveness of the left municipal governments in the recent period and to the decline in the mass mobilizations from the 1984 level.
For his part, Natta presented some initial elements of a self-criticism that could lead to a rectification of the party's general orientation. He recognized, notably, that "in the immediate circumstances the democratic alternative has appeared to be without substance and concrete possibilities."
The PCI Central Committee is in session as this article is being written and it will no doubt give some new indications about the present situation of the party and its leadership.
This is the referendum demanded originally by the made by the government in February 1984 the PCI against the decision to restrict the sliding scale of wages.
International Viewpoint 3 June 1985
DENMARK