‘92 Elections Could Change Face of Europe

Move over, U.S.A.: Elections ’92 is more than an all-American show. It’s Europe’s turn too, from Scotland to Sicily.

With Italy as prelude, Western Europe is marching toward an election season of its own that could bring substantial change in the faces and policies of the unifying Continent.

Italy votes April 5 in its most unpredictable election since World War II. On April 9, British voters will resolve the tightest election race in a generation. In France, the political Establishment will be shaking for months from the stunning protest vote in the March 22 regional elections. Spanish and Greek elections are also possible before year’s end, although neither government seems anxious for them.

Two of the 12 European partners who set their countries on course for continental unity at a historic meeting in Holland last December--the prime ministers of Ireland and Belgium--are already out of office. And by the time frontier-free Europe observes its first birthday at the end of 1993, another handful of its architects may be history.

Commitment to European Community goals cuts across the political spectrum in member states as well as in an impressive list of countries waiting to join a successful and fashionable club. Even aloof Switzerland wants in.

Coming electoral change, therefore, will probably affect the pace and detail of continental change more than its direction.

But national issues are more volatile. This is the Age of Post-Ideology, after all, and it brings vexing and unsettling questions to countries that lived so long on the front line of an East-West confrontation that suddenly isn’t.

“Without ideological issues, I think parties will be forced by the voters to focus on the same sorts of things that bother Americans: health services, the environment, the educational system, how to support aging populations, the apparent inability of some industries to compete with Japan and sometimes the United States,” said Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale professor of comparative politics passing through Rome to sample campaign rhetoric.

In the coming election season, Europeans will help define a new political fulcrum. Is the old left dead? Is the new right for real? Where is the after-Cold War center?

A move by mainstream European parties toward a social democratic consensus may be accelerated by the fall of communism, but it actually began in the days of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, notes Margot Light, a senior lecturer in international affairs at the London School of Economics.

“Elections are rarely fought on foreign policy or ideological issues. They are won and lost on nitty-gritty, parochial issues,” Light said. “Now, more and more parties are claiming the middle ground. It’s back to bread-and-butter politics.”

At the same time, protest votes are on the rise nearly everywhere. Are they principally a measure of disgust with lackluster government by Establishment parties? Or a harbinger of a new-age crusade by would-be reformers--liberal environmentalists to xenophobic neo-fascists--that may rewrite the rules of the political game?

Some commentators believe that a long drought awaits the traditionalist left. “The best the European left can become is what the New Deal looked like in 1936,” said LaPalombara.

Denmark bubbles along with successful welfare-state socialism under a coalition government, but in Britain and in Greece, mainline socialism is moving right to align itself with free-market trends while seeking to oust traditional free-market parties.

In Britain, the opposition Labor Party, under leader Neil Kinnock, has also become a wooer of capitalists while, true to its roots, calling for higher taxes for the rich. Kinnock leads in opinion polls in his race to oust Conservative Prime Minister John Major, the heir of a decade of Thatcherism, and to end 18 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule.

The centrist Liberal Democrats may prove kingmakers if neither of the dominant parties wins an outright majority. But at a high price. Under leader Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrats say they will form a coalition only if their partner supports reform that would replace U.S.-style winner-take-all results with European-style proportional representation.

“Both main parties may look at the idea if they need to form a coalition, but the traditional view is that it causes weak governments and introduces an element of instability foreign to the British and American systems,” said Light by telephone from London.

In Greece, Socialists led by former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou have also edged toward the center in a bid to force early elections on conservative Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis, who holds a razor-thin parliamentary majority.

In Spain, by contrast, conservatives have the difficult task of ousting Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, who was elected 10 years ago as a Socialist but has ruled ever since as an unabashed capitalist, with spectacular but lately tarnished economic results. Gonzalez could call elections this fall or wait until the spring of 1993.

The opposition looks to have better prospects in France’s parliamentary election scheduled for 1993. After 11 years in power, President Francois Mitterrand, whose socialism is as nominal as Gonzalez’s, sags at the vortex of a national political malaise. He is under ferocious attack from traditional center-conservatives as well as insurgents from the environmental left and “France for the French” right-wing extremists.

Italy, whose own labyrinthine multi-party system of weak government seems volatile but has proved one of the world’s most durable, is a microcosm of the Continent’s flux this spring.

Communist parties in France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are moribund or already memories, but the Italian party, which once claimed nearly one-third of the electorate, is battling for survival in the April 5-6 vote that will almost certainly presage the departure of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

The second-largest national party, the Communists have been systematically denied a share of power in Italy since World War II. Rival Christian Democrats have sometimes ruled alone but more often formed coalitions with Socialists and small parties to exclude the Communists.

Italian Communists discovered perestroika long before Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but this has not spared them in communism’s wake. The Marxist 15% of Italy’s Communists have broken away to form their own real Communist party. The rest, though, including those who help govern many of Italy’s largest cities, have changed their movement’s name to the Party of the Democratic Left and their governing creed to social democracy.

The former Communists are so well known, indeed by now so much a part of the political Establishment, that probably not even the Vatican would complain if they were to wangle a place in a national coalition.

The more pertinent question, though, is why vote for the former Communists when there are already so many centrist and leftist electoral alternatives, none of which have had to renounce their party names or principles.

Indeed, not only is there already an Italian Socialist Party and a small Social Democratic Party, both are already vested members of the ruling coalition. Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, in fact, is the likeliest next prime minister.

The Christian Democrats embody the political center in Italy. Yet they are fretful, too, having lost communism for an enemy but not their own reputation for corruption and self-serving patronage. Of all the parties in all the rich countries in the world, only Italy’s church-supported Christian Democrats and Japan’s Social Democrats have been uninterruptedly in power since World War II.

There is great demand for reform among Italian voters, but the political apparatus is lacking--and so is the will among the parties, many Italian analysts say.

“It is not Europe that is the dominant concern of our parties, nor is it the public deficit that keeps them awake at night. It’s not even corruption or criminality which influence the electoral fervor in the corridors of power. No. What they feel most pressure to do is to threaten and to blackmail, to divide the spoils before the vote, to continue an old tragicomic chess game over our heads,” complained commentator Ferdinando Adornato in the Rome newspaper La Repubblica.

Increasingly, the threat to the hegemony of such entrenched parties is voter defection to new movements that grow up around issues rather than ideology.

One such beneficiary of the growing continental protest vote are French-speaking Greens in linguistically divided Belgium, whose parliamentary representation jumped from three to 10 after November elections.

“The Green Party represents a new ideology in Belgium. It is not leftist. It has no social roots,” said Xavier Mabille, co-director of a Brussels research center.

Germany’s Greens failed to reach the 5% vote threshold in 1990 and vanished from Parliament, but divided ecologists won nearly 15% in France. And in Italy, where there is no minimum required vote, the next Parliament will probably accommodate special-interest legislators as disparate as pensioners and porn stars.

In the new Europe, everybody wants a say. Catalan nationalists doubled their vote, to 8%, in elections this month in Spain. In Belgium, the anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok Party, which favors making Dutch-speaking Flanders an independent country, won 25% of the votes in Antwerp and jumped from two deputies to 12.

Scottish and Welsh nationalists tramp the hustings in Britain in competition with the major parties. Three extremist right-wing parties will be among the contestants in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg next month, although the largest among them gets barely 1% in opinion polls. In Italy, there are regional parties for the German-speaking South Tyrol and the French-speaking Val d’Aosta. There is even a Sicilian Independence Party.

“Events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are in effect empowering nationalist and secessionist movements across Europe,” observed Light of the London School of Economics.

For its part, the post-ideology right in Europe swirls around tried and true poles of voter attraction: law and order, immigration and anti-centralism.

Some of the new rightists are angry over the social consequences of successful capitalism, particularly the invasion of foreigners come to seek a piece of the action. Others are frankly nostalgic for the days when trains ran on time.

In France, extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front, which won 14% last Sunday, want immigrants sent back to their homelands. Le Pen is regularly derided as racist and anti-Semitic, and just as regularly runs well in elections. Poor Socialist showings against Le Pen on the one side and Greens on the other in the French vote could force Mitterrand to scrap unpopular Prime Minister Edith Cresson, analysts say.

In Germany, where Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl has a mandate until 1994, the extreme political right still draws more headlines than voters. But the public mood does appear to have shifted perceptibly to the right, driven as much by a reawakened sense of German nationalism as by a growing dislike of immigrants and asylum-seekers flocking into the country.

Italy’s populist Lega Nord party, which may run fourth in the national vote, dislikes immigrants from southern Italy as much as those from Third World countries. Its most scathing disdain, however, is reserved for the central government in Rome, which it portrays as a corrupted vehicle for helping rob the hard-working north on behalf of an indolent south.

The sum of the elections awaiting European Community countries between now and the end of ’93 will go a long way toward laying the foundation for Europe’s political future. If that means uncertainty, there is a cheering counterpoint. In their diversity, the changing new Europeans seem as deeply wedded as their American cousins to democratic principles as the bedrock of their own societies--and of their budding union.

Times staff writers Joel Havemann in Brussels, Tyler Marshall in Berlin and Rone Tempest in Paris contributed to this report.