Word: communists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Only two years ago, it was widely feared that the Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain had a real chance of coming to power in tandem with established democratic parties. Loosely united under the rubric of Eurocommunism, these parties shared a set of common principles-autonomy from Moscow, allegiance to the democratic process and support or at least tolerance of the European Community and the NATO Alliance...
...June 1976, at a congress of Eastern and Western European Communist parties in East Berlin, leaders of the three parties flaunted their differences with the Soviet model of socialism, as Leonid Brezhnev stonily looked...
...France, the debacle began when Party Boss Marchais broke with the "Common Program" of the Socialist-Communist coalition, thereby dooming it to defeat in last year's general election. That fateful choice was based on the Communists' decision that they would not take a back seat to the dominant Socialists if the leftist coalition came to power. Marchais concluded that the Socialists would hog the credit for major social and economic reforms, thereby suggesting to workers that they no longer needed the Communists to defend their interests...
...result, Marchais' French Communist Party, about 700,000 strong, is still ostracized in what French politicians call le ghetto, outside the mainstream of national politics. Increasingly it has reverted to more traditional hard-line postures: it has vehemently opposed the Common Market, revived its loyalty to the Soviet and Eastern European parties, and cracked down on dissent within the party itself...
...profound debate on the identity of the party itself and on the whole idea of Eurocommunism," says Arrigo Levi, former editor of Turin's La Stampa. "Did it go too far or not far enough? The left wing will say we have to be more strongly 'Communist' in order not to lose more ground on our left. The right wing will say we have to recover more of the floating vote from the center and therefore we have to become more social-democratic." The outcome of the debate may well determine whether Eurocommunism remains a plausible strategy...