Italy's Farewell to Berlinguer
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
SETTING OFF FALSE SIGNALS Italy's Farewell to Berlinguer BY SILVIO SENIGALLIA Rome During the slow-paced Congress of Vienna in 1814-15— the "dancing Congress" that gave a new face to...
...Fear that the Communists would benefit from this outpouring of national grief for Berlinguer was justified by the results on June 17...
...That the quick regression was a nationwide phenomenon— an important sign despite the relatively small size of the polling—was carefully glossed over in the Communist press...
...The weekly Europeo approvingly quoted philosopher Lucio Colletti's statement that "the President has once again gone beyond his constitutional duties by bringing the entire state which he represents to the side of the coffin of a party secretary...
...The expectation, rather, is that Alessandro Natta will closely follow Berlinguer's trail, and that Italy will remain in its perennial state of unstable stability—with the European Parliament vote amounting to nothing more than an aberration brought on by the death of a charismatic Communist leader...
...Mario Pirani, editorialist of the Center-Left daily Stampa, wrote: "A religious drama was performed in Piazza San Giovanni...
...But nobody, it should be stressed, thinks the new PCI Secretary will produce immediate answers to these basic questions...
...As was true of Berlinguer, his commitment to the working class is ideological rather than derived from personal experience...
...As noted Leftist historian Giorgio Spini has observed, at present the formulation is a gimmick...
...In the administrative contests held June 24-25, involving some 2 million voters, the PCI lost all the gains just scored, compared to its showing at the local level in 1983...
...This calls for full-scale opposition until it becomes possible to form a Leftist coalition strong enough to govern without DC cooperation...
...As a TV commentator in Britain said of voters there, the electorate was "ablaze with indifference...
...The June 17 PCI victory did have one lasting effect: It settled the question of Berlinguer' s successor...
...On the contrary, the main reaction is apathy, if not outright rejection...
...Heflew to Padua to stay in a hospital room next door to the dying Berlinguer, and he brought the coffin to Rome on the presidential plane...
...For once the press abandoned its customary hearty approval of whatever Pertini does or says...
...Although Natta did not inherit any outstanding problems in foreign affairs or within the party, he eventually will have to resolve a certain ambiguity in the Communist position...
...Berlinguer proposed a "historic compromise" with the Christian Democrats in 1973 that brought the PCI to the threshold of government participation, but the DC kept the door closed...
...A Northern Italian history professor and former PCI member of the Chamber of Deputies, he is a colorless but authoritative 66-year-old intellectual...
...The idea found little support, though, forLamaisnota man of the party and, in any case, was a reluctant candidate...
...Albeit by a margin of only 0.3 per cent, a jubilant PCI achieved its long-awaited sorpasso (overtaking) of its arch rival, the Christian Democratic Party (DC), winner of more votes than any other party in every previous election since World War II...
...Approximately 1 million people, carried to the capital by an endless procession of buses and trains, gathered to honor the deSilvio F. Senigallia reports regularly for The New Leader from Rome...
...and the unanimity rule fettering its Executive—are common knowledge...
...parted Communist Party (PCI) Secretary...
...It reached a climax with his apotheosis at his funeral June 13 in Rome's Piazza San Giovanni...
...Most non-Communist analysts saw this as confirming that the outcome the week before was attributable to extra-political sympathies...
...Today's Europe is similarly no more than a "geographic expression," despite the widening of the European Community to 10 nations from the original six, and 35 years of rhetoric and international conferences...
...The mantle now had to fall to the late leader's closest associate and the surest advocate of his strategy, Alessandro Natta...
...A rather small group of farsighted government leaders, one-world intellectuals and enterprising business people have tried in vain for a long time to create interest in the concept...
...The emotional response to his death four days later—fostered by lengthy television specials and full-page newspaper spreads that had been singing his praises—was staggering...
...Yet for all of its listlessness, the campaign ended dramatically after Enrico Berlinguer suffered a stroke June 7 while delivering a speech in Padua...
...We have stressed with vigor and clarity the international autonomy of the Italian Communist Party and the independence of its strategy, political choices and appraisals," he noted...
...Chief and most noticeable among the mourners, however, was President of the Republic SandroPertini...
...Not surprisingly, the PCI leadership disagreed and argued the greater importance of the European Parliament balloting because of its international focus...
...Losses in the 1979 elections, plus some unhappiness among younger Communists with the free support the PCI had given the bourgeois DC government in 1976-79, prompted a switch to the current "democratic alternative" policy...
...SETTING OFF FALSE SIGNALS Italy's Farewell to Berlinguer BY SILVIO SENIGALLIA Rome During the slow-paced Congress of Vienna in 1814-15— the "dancing Congress" that gave a new face to post-Napoleonic Europe—Austrian Foreign Minister Klem-ens von Metternich accurately described Italy as "a geographic expression...
...Hard-to-die nationalism is certainly a factor, but the primary reason for the failure of pan-European sentiment to take hold is that you cannot replace something with nothing...
...It tells us what PCI does not want, but not what the Communists would do if they had the chance...
...No wonder Italians, like everyone else, are bored by the whole thing...
...Natta was named PCI boss without opposition on June 26, having emerged as the overwhelming choice of both the Central Committee and the party's regional and local functionaries...
...The PCI's tiny " liberal" wing, which had in the past expressed reservations about Berlinguer's hard line toward the Socialists, voiced a preference for Luciano Lama, who heads the predominantly Communist Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL...
...What little debate took place centered on the nation's familiar government versus opposition themes...
...The three small parties that are also in the present government coalition lost ground as well, and Prime Minister Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party (PSI) barely held its own, coming in third as usual...
...He concluded by saying that should developments require it, "the PCI will air its views just as it did on the invasion of Afghanistan and on the Polish events...
...He must also clarify Berlin-guer's notion of a "third way" to Communism—that is, equidistant from both the Soviet model and Western social democracy...
...Natta will have to explain—as Enrico Berlinguer did not—how a Leftist bloc could conceivably come into power when it can at most muster 47 per cent of the vote, even including the unreliable support of extreme Left splinter groups, and when relations between Communists and Socialists are bitterly strained...
...Indeed, criticism of his overinvolvement and display of emotion came from a variety of sources...
...Socialist Claudio Martelli went so far as to say that Pertini had "perhaps involuntarily" helped the Communists...
...But neither jubilation nor dejection lasted very long...
...Natta's first official foreign policy statement—oddly enough, in an interview on the Vatican radio—assured everyone that he would not lead the PCI into the Soviet orbit...
...There is nothing new we have to say on the policy of the Soviet Union...
...So are the time consuming wrangles over milk subsidies and how big a contribution Britain should make to the till...
...The prospect of unity is still far from being a dream that arouses hope and enthusiasm among the French, the British, the Irish, the Danish, the Dutch, West Germans, Belgians, Luxembourg-ers, Greeks, or Italians...
...Every Italian political leader, including Giorgio Almirante of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), paid his respects to the body lying in state at Communist headquarters...
...The Community's peculiarities as an organization— the unwieldy location of its offices in Strasbourg, Brussels and Luxembourg...
...Some decades had to pass before this country became a political-administrative reality...
...the merely symbolic significance of motions approved by its Parliament...
...The publisher of the Milan daily II Giornale, Indro Montanelli, condemned "the pageant of the funereal kermis" and blamed Pertini for it...
...Pertini was the father who brings the son's body back home and, weeping, lays it at the feet of the relatives, the comrades, the people, while the holders of public power are forced to play the role of vice paying homage to virtue...
...The campaign here for the election last June 17 of 81 deputies to the European Parliament hardly discussed Continental issues...
Vol. 67 • June 1984 • No. 12
