Italy’s Communists Retain Leverage

ROME — Italy’s center-left government, struggling to reform the welfare state and qualify for Europe’s monetary union, got a troubling reminder from voters Monday of its dependence on a minority party of die-hard Marxists opposed to deep cuts in social spending.

Sunday’s runoff elections for 77 mayors and five provincial leaders completed the first test of voter support for Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s government since it took office in April 1996 and made Italy’s participation in a single European currency its top priority.

Returns Monday suggested a draw between Prodi’s Olive Tree coalition and the right-wing opposition Freedom Alliance, each winning in four of the biggest cities up for grabs. But the results in Milan and Turin, twin industrial centers of the north, underscored the small Communist Refoundation party’s ability to shape the outcome.

Turin’s mildly leftist mayor, Valentino Castellani of the Olive Tree coalition, had finished far behind his Freedom Alliance rival in first-round voting April 27, but he won reelection by less than a 1% margin Sunday after seeking and winning the Communist Refoundation’s endorsement.

The Olive Tree candidate in Milan, Aldo Fumagalli, refused to court the hard-left party and lost to Gabriele Albertini of the Freedom Alliance in a race between businessmen to manage Italy’s financial capital. Albertini won with 53% of the vote.

The Communist Refoundation had won 8% of the first-round vote in Milan and 10% in Turin, prompting party leader Fausto Bertinotti to warn that Olive Tree candidates there faced “suicide” in the runoff elections without his blessing. Bertinotti said Sunday’s returns proved his party is indispensable to the ruling coalition.

“The future of the Prodi government depends on the welfare state,” he declared.

Political commentators agreed that the results--or at least Bertinotti’s jubilant interpretation of them--spell trouble for Prodi’s hope of diminishing Communist influence over his policies.

The government begins negotiations today with labor unions and political parties on the cuts it must make in the state’s generous social spending programs--mainly those for health care and pensions--if Italy is to be among the first countries to join the monetary union in 1999.

The European Commission, in an interim report last month, said Italy is falling short of its target for reducing deficit spending set by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty for membership in the monetary union.

Prodi, an economist who once managed Italy’s largest state holding company, has said he will resign if he fails in that effort. There is pro-European sentiment across most of the spectrum--from the Freedom Alliance led by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi to the Democratic Party of the Left, former Communists who broke with Bertinotti’s hard-liners after 1991 and now form the bulk of Prodi’s coalition.

But Prodi’s majority in the 630-member Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Parliament, depends on an alliance with 34 Communist Refoundation deputies, whose party is not a member of Italy’s most left-leaning government since World War II.

The party’s pivotal role was underscored earlier this spring when its refusal to support an Italian-led military mission to aid rebellion-troubled Albania brought the government to the brink of crisis. Prodi eventually won approval with help from the right-wing opposition.

But it would be far more difficult for Prodi to withstand a hard-line Communist defection in Parliament against cuts in welfare spending, even though the opposition has the votes to help achieve them.

“The price that the right might extract for the support of those measures might be Mr. Prodi’s head,” said Tana de Zulueta, a senator in the Olive Tree coalition.

The government says it made no deals with Bertinotti on welfare reform to win his Communist deputies’ support in local elections.

“We will have to confront each other on these issues,” Prodi said Monday. “We have to have a plan for the long-term development of a balanced and healthy state.”

While Bertinotti has said the price of monetary union may be too high for Italy, he has not ruled out a compromise. Political leaders say the coming weeks of negotiations will be critical.

“A day of reckoning is approaching not just for the government but for Bertinotti,” De Zulueta said. “If he is not willing to negotiate with a view to phasing out certain welfare benefits, then he must live with the consequences, which could well be the end of the left-wing government that he voted in.”