By Dick Nichols
On October 9, the Italian government of Romano Prodi lost a vote of no confidence in the Italian lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. The fall of the Prodi government, which has been in office since the 1996 Italian general elections, was due to the withdrawal of support of the parliamentary fraction of the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC).
On October 4, the national political committee of the PRC voted by 188 to 112 to withdraw support from the Prodi government. In the heated debate that preceded the vote, PRC national secretary Fausto Bertinotti and national president Armando Cossutta took opposing sides.
Although Cossutta lost the vote in the party leadership, he gained the support of 22 of the PRC's 34 deputies. After several days of confusion, Cossutta announced his resignation as PRC national president. He also announced the PRC parliamentary faction's decision to support Prodi in the October 9 vote of confidence.
A split in the PRC now seems inevitable, despite the fact that its fourth national congress has been set for early 1999.
Since his Olive Tree coalition's victory in April 1996, Prodi has been dependent on PRC support. The communists have been part of the government majority, but have not held ministerial positions. The government coalition includes the Party of the Democratic Left, the Italian People's Party, Italian Renewal, the Greens and other minor parties.
Left opposition
The PRC's tactical approach has been to try to extract concessions from Prodi by threatening to withdraw support if the government shifts too far to the right. Prodi has countered by warning that the withdrawal of PRC support could mean early elections and a victory for the right-wing parties, Forza Italia, the Northern League and the National Alliance.
But how far to the right is "too far"? The PRC's ambiguous and difficult relationship with the government has dominated internal politics in the PRC. At its third national congress in December 1996, the party divided into an 85% majority, headed jointly by Bertinotti and Cossutta, and a 15% minority led by the best-known Italian Trotskyist, Livio Maitan, and Marco Ferrando.
The minority called for "repositioning the party in opposition in order to create the most favourable conditions in the battle for hegemony in the working class and other popular layers".
The most testing time in the relationship comes each year when Prodi begins the autumn budget discussions. Prodi is determined to reduce the budget deficit to bring Italy within the Maastricht guidelines for European monetary union.
In the 1996 negotiations over the 1997-8 budget, the PRC won the maintenance of expenditure on health and pensions, even though there were sharp cuts elsewhere in the budget. In the 1997 negotiations over the 1998-9 budget, the price of PRC support was a promise from Prodi to legislate for the introduction of a 35-hour week from the year 2000.
The 1997 budget negotiations also produced the first signs of tension between Cossutta and Bertinotti. Cossutta publicly questioned whether the PRC should be engaging in brinkmanship which could lead to the installation of a government less progressive than Prodi's. The line was not understood by many PRC voters and sympathisers.
Bertinotti's reply was that Cossutta's position freed Prodi to carry out whatever neo-liberal policy he liked, since he would always be sure of PRC support when the chips were down. It would make it more difficult for the PRC to mobilise its base around issues like jobs and defence of the welfare state, Bertinotti said.
Tension between Cossutta and Bertinotti reached new heights last August, when Cossutta supporters questioned the 14-point set of demands on the Prodi government, adopted at the July meeting of the PRC leadership. This meeting put Prodi on notice that, unless his government adopted a radical shift in policy on jobs, health and education spending, the PRC would withdraw its support.
Prodi clearly framed the 1999-2000 budget with a view to producing a split within the PRC. The budget, tabled in parliament at the beginning of October, is Prodi's mildest to date.
Crossroads
At the PRC national political committee meeting, Bertinotti's argument for a move into opposition referred not only to Italian politics, but also to the European and international stage. His overwhelming concern was that the unpopularity of the Prodi government, reflected in an increased vote for the right wing in municipal elections, would rub off on the PRC.
Bertinotti summed up the choice facing the party: "We are at a crossroads. Two years ago we made a brave decision, that of supporting the Prodi government, albeit from outside and critically. We made an investment in trying to get a reform policy off the ground. We don't in the least regret having done that. We tried it out, even at the price of risking unpopularity.
"The goal of entry into the Euro [monetary union] was objectively the overarching determinant of politics in our country and the rest of Europe. That's why we adopted a policy of defending what was possible, without which our welfare system, for example, would have been devastated. In this way we at least kept open the possibility of a struggle against neo-liberalism.
"But now? ... it's as if, having crossed the desert in search of an oasis, they are telling us, once we have found it, that it's only a mirage and so we just have to carry on the journey in the same conditions as before."
For Bertinotti, the Prodi government has no policies against rising structural unemployment and the coming recession. It is like Tony Blair's Labour government as opposed to the "pole of [French leader] Lionel Jospin".
The PRC should take advantage of the election of the Social Democratic Party in Germany and the doubling of the vote of the Swedish Left Party to drive a Europe-wide movement for a shorter working week and against unemployment, he said.
Cossutta's address to the PRC leadership stressed that while there was a still a need for a more radical shift from Prodi, this had to be pursued from within the government majority. "This shift can only be realised when, faced with the present balance of political forces, there are signs of new movements in society. I don't see a sign of such movements."
The heart of Cossutta's argument was the impossibility of replacing the Prodi government with a more progressive government. Cossutta argued, "We would not only have a split at the top, but we would also find our party facing inevitable social, cultural and political isolation from the people, from the popular masses. We would find ourselves isolated from our own voters and from those who, while not voting for us, still look on us with sympathy ... the split would go deep into the people."
Cossutta ended with the observation that, "What is emerging is a new majority, a Bertinotti-Maitan majority in place of the Cossutta-Bertinotti majority, which was the political axis of the last congress".
The split in the PRC opens a new phase in Italian politics. If the headlines in the mainstream media in Italy are anything to go by ("Bertinotti defeats Cossutta with the help of the Trots"), the war of the ruling class against the PRC is set to escalate.