Democrats of the Left

Democrats of the Left, former Italian political party and historically western Europe’s largest communist party.

The party was originally founded in January 1921 as the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI) by dissidents of the extreme left wing of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano). The new party matured quickly, sending deputies to parliament before Benito Mussolini’s fascists outlawed all political parties in 1926. After that year, the PCI went underground to establish an organization that later proved important to the Italian Resistance. During the 1920s and ’30s the PCI established strong links with the government of the Soviet Union.

After World War II, the PCI joined five other antifascist parties in coalition governments until May 1947, when premier Alcide De Gasperi of the Christian Democratic Party (Partito della Democrazia Cristiana) excluded both the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party from a new government. The PCI’s consistent success at the polls ensured that it would continue to influence Italy’s political life. In particular, the communists’ ability to win votes away from the socialists’ left wing affected the policies of that important party. The PCI was a mass party, with extensive networks of support organizations, including trade unions, cooperatives, sports clubs, and newspapers. The party adopted a reform-oriented communism that rejected violence, and it was able to win power and govern successfully at the local level, especially in central Italy.

In 1956, when the revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes was followed by the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian revolt, communist leader Palmiro Togliatti helped dissociate the party from the Soviet Union by proposing the concept of “polycentrism,” a form of limited independence among communist parties. After Togliatti’s death in 1964, the PCI nearly split into “Russian” and “Italian” wings over this concept. Despite this conflict and other splits to the left, the PCI won 27 percent of the vote in the 1968 parliamentary elections. However, the persistent Cold War blocked serious consideration of the communists’ entry into a governing coalition at the national level.

Enrico Berlinguer, who led the party from 1972 until his death in 1984, became one of Europe’s leading proponents of Eurocommunism, or “national communism,” which advocated the flexible adjustment of communist principles to national or local needs and conditions. Attempting to make the PCI a viable coalition partner for the Christian Democrats, Berlinguer introduced in 1973 what he called a “historic compromise,” which called for an alliance between Italy’s two leading parties. Berlinguer’s compromise, never popular with the party’s base, led to PCI support for successive governments between 1976 and 1979, and, though the party never formally entered a governing coalition, Berlinguer was given a formal consultative role to the Christian Democratic prime minister. By the late 1980s, events in eastern Europe made the communist label increasingly distasteful to many in the party. In an effort to consolidate left-wing forces and to create a broader base for opposition to the Christian Democrats, the party changed its name in 1991 to become the Democratic Party of the Left (subsequently shortened in 1998 to Democrats of the Left). Following the party’s name change and its break from much of its communist past, dissident communists formed the more-orthodox Communist Refoundation Party (Partito della Rifondazione Comunista), and thousands left the party.

In the 1990s the party joined with other centre-left parties to form the Olive Tree coalition. From 1996 to 2001 the party formed part of Italy’s governing coalition, and its leader, Massimo D’Alema, served as prime minister from October 1998 to April 2001. In 2007 the party merged with the centrist Daisy (Margherita) party to form a new centre-left party known simply as the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico).