Italy’s Ex-Communists May Have Shed Their Jinx : Elections: After landmark local wins, they are seen as contenders for the national power that eluded them.

The fall of the Berlin Wall that killed communism may have lifted a can’t-win jinx from what used to be the largest Communist Party in the West: Now, for the first time, it is the leading contender to win national power.

This irony is the conclusion many Italian analysts are drawing in the aftermath of landmark municipal elections in which left-wing alliances swept Rome, Naples, Venice, Genoa, Trieste and many smaller cities among 129 at stake nationwide.

Shorn of their Marxist left wing, renamed the Party of the Democratic Left and officially socially democratic, the former Communists are early favorites to win Italy’s next national elections, probably in March.

Italians who unflaggingly elected U.S.-backed centrist governments that kept communism from power for four decades seemed undismayed by the prospect. The former Communists, known now as the PDS for their acronym in Italian, are “a legitimate candidate for leading the government,” observed former President Francesco Cossiga.

Said Achille Occhetto, PDS secretary general: “This country has a mature left that wants to govern. Now we are ready for the battle that must be played out in March.”

The key question then will be whether protesting voters, having punished corruption-tarred established parties in the municipal races, will drift back to accustomed centrist haunts for a national election. The current PDS ruled, as Communists, most of Italy’s major cities in the 1970s and early 1980s.

This time, the new left assembled City Hall victories through electoral alliances such as the one between former Communists and environmentalists that brought victory to Francesco Rutelli, a 39-year-old Green Party leader. Rutelli defeated neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini 53.1% to 46.9%.

“Today we can say that Rome has closed the door on the old system of power. We have our hands free, clean and unfettered by anyone,” said Rutelli, who jounces around Rome on a motorbike.

What Rutelli and the other new mayors now must answer through their actions before the national election is: How left is the new Italian left? It claims to be mainstream, but even some Romans who voted for him see Rutelli as a kind of political watermelon: green on the outside and red in the middle.

Even more blatantly leftist is PDS party official and Naples Mayor-elect Antonio Bassolino, who defeated neo-fascist Alessandra Mussolini 55.6% to 44.4%. Even in defeat, neo-fascists celebrated. The election marked their graduation to the political mainstream: The neo-fascist Italian Social Movement mustered a typical 5.4% in 1992 general elections.

Left-right showdowns throughout Italy on Sunday came of voter desertion of the centrist Christian Democratic Party and such longtime government allies as the Socialists and Republicans. Not long ago, Christian Democrats could count on 60% of the Naples vote.

But the parties that have formed Italy’s coalition governments since World War II have been decimated by a kickback scandal that has implicated more than 3,000 politicians, business leaders and government officials and destroyed the credibility of Italy’s ruling class.

Moving into the vacuum, the left rebuffed not only neo-fascists in the south but also the autonomy-minded Northern League in major cities of the north. In Venice, Massimo Cacciari, a philosophy professor supported by the former Communists and seven other leftist parties, defeated League candidate Aldo Mariconda 55.4% to 44.6%, final returns showed.

In Genoa, League candidate Enrico Serra was easily defeated by the left’s Adriano Sansa 59.2% to 40.8%. In Trieste, Riccardo Illy, an independent businessman supported by the left, defeated right wing-backed former Mayor Giulio Staffieri 53% to 47%.

The League suffered a new blow Tuesday, when its former treasurer was accused of accepting about $120,000 from an Italian company as illegal campaign contributions in 1992. That is small potatoes in a country where scandals have been monumental: The former president of Italy’s major chemical conglomerate told judges Tuesday of payoffs in the 1980s totaling more than $400 million.

“The right didn’t make it; the League is stopped. The choice of government falls on the alliance of progressives,” the Rome newspaper La Repubblica said.

While corruption and collusion with organized crime are the overriding national themes, traffic, pollution, deficits, featherbedding and poor administration are key issues in virtually every Italian city.

In both Rome and Naples, new mayors will succeed administrators appointed by the central government after the irremediable, scandal-marked collapse of ruling municipal coalitions.

Compared with the starched capitals of its rich European Community partners, central Rome looks like a Third World cousin. Its services are stagnant, its air is often bad, and its streets are dirty and overrun by cars despite traffic restrictions that are among the most Draconian in Europe--at least on paper.