Italian Vote Deals Defeat to Communists

The Italian Communist Party suffered a surprising defeat while the dominant Christian Democrats and the pivotal Socialists scored gains in parliamentary elections Monday. But feuding between the two victorious parties is expected to delay formation of a stable coalition government for weeks or even months.

The Communist reversal caught Italian commentators by surprise because pre-election public opinion polls had forecast a large enough gain to raise the possibility of Communist participation for the first time in 40 years in a new leftist government.

The unpredicted gains by the Christian Democrats and a substantial advance by the Socialists make it almost certain that the two parties, whose feuding forced the crisis that brought on the early election, face a prolonged period of wrangling over which will get to lead a new coalition government, Italy’s 47th since World War II.

No postwar Italian political party has ever held an absolute parliamentary majority that would permit it to govern alone.

Based on early returns and computer projections of two days of voting that ended in the early afternoon, the largest Communist Party in the West received 26.6% of the votes cast for the Chamber of Deputies, down sharply from 29.9% in the last general election in 1983. In separate polling for the Senate, the upper house of the Italian Parliament, the Communists won 28.3%, a loss of almost 3% that may cost the party eight Senate seats, according to the highly respected private forecasting agency, Doxa.

The Socialists, who led Italy’s most durable government since World War II under former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, showed the largest gain, jumping from 11.4% of the vote for the lower house in 1983 to 14.3%, with a slightly smaller gain in voting for the Senate.

‘Historic Level’

“We have reached a historic level of success,” a jubilant Craxi said. “We have sown and now we are beginning to reap.”

Bolstered by his party’s gains, Craxi is expected to demand his return to the prime ministership as his price for casting his pivotal parliamentary votes with a new coalition.

But his most likely key coalition partner, the Christian Democrat Party, also received a boost in the election projections and will certainly seek the top spot for one of its own. It was Craxi’s refusal to step down in favor of a Christian Democrat after more than three years in office last March that brought about his resignation and the call for new elections a year ahead of schedule.

The Christian Democrats held their spot as the dominant party in Parliament by polling 33.9% in the lower house and 33.3% in the Senate--about one percentage point higher in each house than the party received in 1983.

New Resolve Seen

In Italy’s complicated proportional voting system, gains or losses of a single percentage point are significant. The Christian Democrats’ increase in the face of pre-election forecasts of a loss is expected to strengthen their resolve to regain the prime minister’s job. Christian Democrats have led or dominated every Italian government since 1945.

“The vote was a clear victory,” said one of the party leaders, Vincenzo Scotti.

Noting the Socialist and Christian Democrat gains, Liberal Party leader Livio Zanone said, with irony, that “the majority parties that have done the most to lacerate the coalition seem to have gained the most” in the election. The Craxi coalition government, like most recent governments, was made up of Socialists, Christian Democrats, Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats.

Early projections showed all three of the minor coalition parties performing about the same in the vote count this time as they did in 1983. The five coalition parties together polled more than 50% of the vote.

But the new Green Party, making its first run in an Italian general election, registered 2% of the vote, gaining its first seats in Parliament. The Greens campaigned on an anti-nuclear, pro-ecology platform that was credited by many analysts, including Communists, with attracting many voters who would otherwise have voted Marxist.

“There was an erosion of our electorate toward the Greens,” said Communist Sen. Emanuele Macaluso.

“We have penalized the Communists, from whom our candidates have subtracted votes,” said a Green candidate, Grazia Francescato.

A Socialist labor union leader, Giorgio Benvenuti, blamed the Communist loss on the party’s failure to stand up for labor when the Craxi government successfully pressed a referendum that sharply reduced the country’s inflation-building scala mobile-- an escalator clause in national labor contracts that continually boosted wages above the inflation rate.

Polarization Blamed

Alessandro Natta, leader of the Communist Party, said he will analyze the results before deciding why his party slumped so badly. However, he said, “I think the polarization of the conflict between the (coalition) government parties has dominated the campaign and certainly penalized the smaller parties.”

Another factor in the Communists’ loss may have been the party’s recent campaign to upgrade its image in a middle-class society by appealing more to upwardly mobile young people, women and professionals and less to its basic constituency of blue collar workers. Union sources speculated that the campaign backfired, turning some working men away while missing the targeted middle class.