Stéphane Mourlane

 

The death of the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s General Secretary, Enrico Berlinguer, on June 11, 1984 caused a very strong emotion in Italy. Two days later, about one million people gathered in Rome along the route of the funeral procession between the Via della Botteghe Oscure where the PCI took place, and the Piazza San Giovanni. At the head of a party that, since the fall of Fascism and the establishment of the Republic, represented the second political force, Berlinguer was regarded not only as one of the main players in the Italian political life of the second half of the twentieth century, but also as one of the major figures in the history of European communism.

Born on May 25, 1922 in Sardinia, of a lawyer, elected socialist father, Enrico Berlinguer grew up in Mussolini's Italy in the middle of a an anti-Fascist environment. In 1943, while the regime was falling apart, with its power limited to the northern part of Italy, controlled by the Germans around the Republic of Salò, he joined the Resistance, which led him to prison. At the end of the Civil War, he rejoined the PCI that imposed itself with the Christian Democrats (DC) as the main party structuring the political life of the nascent Republic. He entered the Central Committee in 1948 and became responsible for the training of youth. He was distinguished by a more distant position from the Party’s leadership regarding the Soviet model. His critics were expressed openly after the intervention of the Red Army in Prague in 1968, when he was elected deputy for the first time. Once he became General Secretary of the PCI in 1972, he would continue to advocate greater autonomy from Moscow and try to unite in this perspective his French and Spanish comrades under the banner of Eurocommunism. Enrico Berlinguer was also associated in the memories with the conclusion of a "historical compromise" that brought closer the PCI to the DC, which was in power continuously since the end of the war. In a climate of political crisis marked by high terrorist violence fueled by both extreme right wing and extreme left wing, economic crisis and social consequence of the 1973 oil shock, Berlinguer feared that Italy did not know an authoritarian drift. He was also convinced that the left, even federated, could not achieve a parliamentary majority. Under these conditions, an alliance with the DC could bring "elements of socialism in the government," he thought. The PCI, witnessing continuous electoral progression, was in a strong position, receiving 34.4% of the votes in the parliamentary elections of 1976. It was a historical record. The DC won 38.7% and formed a new government led by Giulio Andreotti, while the PCI did not prevent the formation of the government, and abstained from participating in the vote of confidence in Parliament. In 1978, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, leader of the DC and maker of the historical compromise with Berlinguer, demonstrated that this policy raised resistance especially among those who used violence as a strategy of destabilization of Republican institutions. Without ever participating in government, the PCI still managed to promote some reforms and benefited from the allocation of positions (lottizzazione) in the public and para-public sectors. Its influence, however, was not sufficiently decisive.

Back to the opposition, the PCI was removed from the pentapartisme (pentapartismo) that assembled in the early 1980s around the DC the secular parties (Socialist Party, Democratic Socialist Party, the Republican Party and the Liberal Party). The DC, that was in a declined position in elections consultations, especially dealing with numerous scandals, left the presidency for the first time since nearly 40 years. After the Republican Giovanni Spadolini, the Socialist Bettino Craxi became head of the government in August 1983. The man who led the Socialist Party since 1976 wanted to impose a new more personal style to politics, mainly by using the Medias. Craxi and Berlinguer failed to agree. One of the main points of contention lied in the strategy of fighting inflation that threatened the Italian economy. Craxi imposed a price freeze on the public sector, wages and rents, while the Communists defended the indexation of wages to the cost of living.

In this context, Berlinguer became head of the Communist campaign in the European elections of 1984. He suffered a fatal stroke while holding a meeting in Padua a few days before the election of June 17. He was no longer alive to witness the historic victory of his party ahead of the DC, albeit slightly (0.3%), but for the first time. If we could talk in this election about the Berlinguer effect, the PCI, however, would gradually face the loss of its electorate. It disappeared when, in the early 1990s, the Italian political system knew a great movement of recomposition following the operation "clean hands" against political corruption, in the middle of which there was Craxi, who led the government until 1987.

 

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Francesco Barbagallo, Enrico Berlinguer, Roma, Carocci, 2006.

Simona Colarizi, Marco Gervasoni, La Cruna dell’ago. Craxi, il partito socialista e la crisi della Repubblica, Bari-Roma, Laterza, 2005.

Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les Partis communistes français et italien de la Libération à nos jours, Paris, Éditions Aubier, 1992.

Renzo Martinelli, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, Torino, Einaudi, 1995.