BERLIN: Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, few would expect western Europe’s once-powerful communist parties and their various successor organizations to have anything more than the weakest of pulses. But increasingly there are surprising signs of life. The latest is the German Linkspartei, which eight days from the German election stands at 9 per cent in nationwide opinion polls and is the most popular choice for easterners facing high unemployment and low wages. At the moment this party is an alliance of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) of eastern Germany and the mainly west German Social Justice party, a trade-union-led split from the Social Democrats. They are committed to forming a new party within two years.
In Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi’s government appears to be terminally discredited, Rifondazione Comunista (PRC), a product of the last decade of Italy’s radical social movements along with different left groups from the historic Italian Communist party (PCI), is part of the Romano Prodi-led L’Unione, a coalition with the larger and much less radical Left Democrats (from the moderate wing of the PCI) and the Margherita party. Next spring L’Unione will most likely win the Italian general election.
The French Communist party has a high membership on paper, but the efforts of its leader Marie-George Buffet to break with an authoritarian past and to overcome a deep distrust have until recently been limited. In the past year, however, the party’s role in the popular campaign for a ‘left no’ to the European constitution has strengthened attempts to open up the party and make it part of a wider international realignment of the left.
The revival is still patchy. In Spain the United Left, in which the Communist party is the leading partner, is still losing seats in parliament; and in Greece the innovative Synaspismos, a breakaway from the orthodox Greek Communist party, remains small. But the German PDS and Italian PRC have the social weight and commitment to break with the past and make a difference to modern European politics. PDS membership is ageing, but electorally the party appeals disproportionately to the young.
Until the formation of the Linkspartei it was stuck in an eastern ghetto. But cooperation with the Social Justice party and its leader Oscar Lafontaine, a former finance minister and star of the west German left, has allowed it to go national — even if its transformation from a former party of state to a party rooted in local social movements, genuinely open to feminism, ecology and other influences, is an unfinished struggle.
The reform process faces a particular problem in that, in many east German cities and regions, the PDS is running underfunded governments facing deep economic problems. The party ends up implementing policies that alienate the very constituencies with whom it is trying to work.
In Italy the strength of the PRC lies in its credibility among strong social and radical trade-union movements and municipal councils. In this spring’s regional elections the L’Unione coalition won 12 out of the 14 regions, including Puglia, where Rifondazione’s gay, communist, Catholic candidate Niki Vendola was elected governor after 10 years of rule by the right. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
