Eurocommunism and Communist Parties In Coalition Governments In Europe

Eurocommunism was a tendency in communist parties in Europe during the 1970s. The Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring cast communist parties in Western Europe in a bad light. How could they follow Moscow's ead after that? So they started articulating their own path and asserted their independence from the Soviet Union.

This tendency was a moderating tendency. Ernest Mandel, a follower of Trotsky and therefore a critic of Stalin, decried this tendency. He called Eurocommunism "the bitter fruits of socialism in one country."

Anyways, two instances of these "bitter fruits" stand out to me. One is the historic compromise, led by Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). This involved support for the Christian Democrats (DC). I guess that the PCI did not enter the government in the elections of 1976, but refused to vote against the DC on no-confidence votes in parliament. In some sense, the communists were to the right of the socialists, let alone the workerists outside of the parties.

Another case is Francois Mitterand, a socialist, who was elected president of France in 1981. He took the French Communist Party (PCF) into his governing coalition. The communists did not do well, being sort of domesticated.

That was a while ago. But take a look at Portugal. Antonio Costa, a socialist, was elected Prime Minister in 2015 and served to 2024. This was a coalition government, called the Left Bloc. The Portuguese Communist Party and the Greens were also coalition members. Costa is now President of the European Council. Since 2024, Portugal's Prime Minister is Luís Montenegro, head of a more right-leaning coalition. To confuse me, his party is the Social Democratic Party. I think the names of the parties suggests, to an American, that they are more left-wing than they are now. As of February, the Portuguese president is Jose Seguro, a socialist. I gather that his election was a matter of staving off the far right, in some sense.

So the history of socialism and communism includes typical parliamentary machinations, compromises, coalitions, and so on. To understand Portugal, I should know more about Salazar and the Carnation Revolution.