Communist Party, Italy

Communist Party, Italy (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) Founded on 21 January 1921, following a breakaway of the extreme left in protest against the reformism of the Italian Socialist Party. It was led by the Neapolitan engineer Amadeo Bordiga (b. 1899, d. 1970) and supported by Gramsci and his followers. The development of the party was severely constrained by the rise of Mussolini, so that by 1923 the PCI had only 9,000 members. The leadership passed to the more pragmatic Gramsci, under whom membership rose to almost 25,000 members by 1925, which ensured that it was able to provide the main opposition to Mussolini by 1926. In that year its leadership was either exiled or imprisoned, and, owing to the lack of a mass base in Italian society, it was unable to offer much resistance to Mussolini until the end of the Fascist era.

The PCI was quick to organize itself in a liberated Italy from 1944, and with its new emphasis on pragmatism and its commitment to operate within the existing political framework, it had attracted over 1.5 million members by 1945, and supported De Gasperi in government. Under the influence of the Cold War, the PCI was frozen out of government in 1947, and henceforth resumed its opposition to the political system and its allegiance to the USSR. Following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, however, the PCI finally abandoned its close links to Moscow and came to adopt an independent, Eurocommunist stance which aimed at an Italian road to socialism, rather than Communist world revolution. The party's commitment to pragmatic politics was emphasized by Enrico Berlinguer (b. 1922, d. 1982), who established the PCI as an influential force in the mainstream of Italian politics, e.g. through its agreement in 1976 to tolerate Andreotti's Christian Democrat-led government. By contrast, from 1979 it became the leading opposition to the broad coalition governments that emerged.

As a result of its position outside government circles throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, with the breakup of the old party system in 1992–3 it was relatively untainted by political scandals. The PCI's successor parties, the reformed PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, Democratic Party of the Left, which in 1999 was named the DS) and the more orthodox RC (Rifondazione Comunista, New Communist Foundation), became the largest parties on the left with 115 and 40 seats respectively in 1994. Furthermore, as a result of electoral alliances designed against Berlusconi's Forza Italia, the PDS won the local and regional elections of 1993, becoming the leading party in the Olive Tree coalition of Romano Prodi, which won the 1996 parliamentary elections. Between 1996–2001, the Olive Tree coalition was weakened significantly by the RC's opposition to a number of reform measures in the Senate. It was the RC's opposition to the budget which caused Prodi's resignation in 1998. The DS and the RC lost heavily in the 2001 elections, both against the Forza Italia and against the more moderate parties on the centre-left, which joined forces under the Margherita Alliance led by Francesco Rutelli.

http://www.dsonline.it; http://www.rifondazione.it