The Economist November 20th 2021 Europe 41Marxbrothers
A
perk of being locked up by a fascist dictator is that it leaves
you with a lot of time on your hands. Altiero Spinelli, an Ital
ian communist, spent the bulk of his youth imprisoned by Benito
Mussolini. During one stint of internment in 1941, Spinelli used
his spare time to come up with the Ventotene Manifesto, named
after the island off Naples to which he was banished. Pieced to
gether on cigarette papers, it provided a socialist blueprint for a
federal Europe, earning the communist thinker a legacy as one of
the more obscure founding fathers of the eu.
Aside from the European Parliament building in Brussels,
which bears Spinelli’s name, communists left little mark on the
club. Across western Europe, moderate Christian and Social
Democrats ran the show. The Eurocommunists, who looked to
Brussels rather than Moscow, were briefly in vogue in the 1970s
and 1980s. Wily socialists, such as François Mitterrand, soon put
them out of business. In Italy, where communists once won 34%
of the vote, the party fell apart after communism collapsed in east
ern Europe. And countries that had lived under communism were
desperate to join the eu, in part so the ideology could not return.
The spectre of communism no longer haunts Europe. But it
does occasionally jump from behind the curtain and shout “boo”.
Sometimes the surprise comes from the least likely spots. Austria
is probably the most bourgeois country in Europe: rich, cosy and
more than a little smug about it. Yet its second city, Graz, is now
run by the Austrian Communist Party, which came first in local
elections with 29% of the vote. Wags soon renamed it Leningraz.
It was a revolution decades in the making. A low threshold for
winning seats on the city’s council meant that communists could
scrape a few even in dry years, and busy themselves with running
the city’s housing policy. Popular measures helped, such as com
munist councillors donating twothirds of their salaries to the
needy. “What we are doing now would have been ordinary social
democrat policy in the 1970s,” says Max Zirngast, a councillor who
spent three months in a Turkish jail for criticising Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s autocratic regime before entering the world of Austrian
municipal politics. A world without capitalism is still the aim. But
a city with more social housing will do for now.
Tradition rather than grassroots fervour keeps the red flag fly
inginCyprus.Theisland’s communist party, akel, is one of the
country’s two main parties. It prospers thanks to an almost Angli
can attitude to communism: just as one does not have to believe in
God to go to church every Sunday, so Cypriots can vote for commu
nists without wishing to seize the means of production. Cardcar
rying communists in shiny Mercedeses are a common sight. Force
of habit rather than belief explains the party’s persistence, argues
James KerLindsay of the London School of Economics. As one of
the biggest parties, akelis helped by being able to dish out the pa
tronage that still dominates Cypriot politics.
In Europe, parties can be tiny but still influential. Christian
Democrats found themselves supporting decidedly unChristian
ideals due to panic about those to their right. Crackdowns on asy
lumseekers and cuts to welfare budgets were triggered by parties
that mustered barely a tenth of the vote. The same logic works for
the far left. In an age of fragmentation, any party that can win even
5% of the vote becomes relevant. Take Portugal. Antonio Costa, the
Socialist but still centreleft prime minister, relied on both the
Portuguese Communist Party and the Left Bloc to remain in office.
Parties do not always use this power well. The communists vot
ed against Mr Costa’s budget, leaving elections likely early next
year. It was an odd decision. The budget was stuffed with lefty
spending pledges, such as increased pensions and free child care.
Now the leftist parties face losses in an election, the polls suggest.
Such cockups are common. In the Czech Republic, the Commu
nist Party of Bohemia and Moravia opted to support Andrej Babis,
a billionaire, as prime minister. Three years later, the party was
kicked out of parliament for the first time since 1948.
It is little surprise that the most successful farleft parties of re
cent years have eschewed outright communism. Some of Syriza’s
leaders spent time in the Greek communist youth movement, but
the party which ran Greece from 201519 bristled at mention of the
cword. (Hardcore lefties repay the favour by seeing Syriza and its
eventual compromise with the euas an example of what not to do
in power.) Podemos, a farleft Spanish party, is part of the govern
ing coalition, but its brand of antiausterity populism comes from
a different tradition to Europe’s remaining reds.That country of single blessedness
Yet some traditional Marxist parties are savvy. The Workers’ Party
of Belgium (ptb), which began life as a home for Marxists who
found Belgium’s Communist Party a bit soft, is now a mainstream
party. Pressure from the ptbled to Belgium gumming up a free
trade deal between the eu and Canada, which sent diplomats on a
crash course on the rules of Belgian federalism. Popular cam
paigns to slash taxes on energy put leftwing rivals in government
in an awkward spot. In the Flemish parliament, it mischievously
complained that a pay cut for mps had not actually gone through,
two years after its approval. If polls are borne out, the farleft party
is set to become the thirdlargest in the national parliament.
Wallonia, the Frenchspeaking region of Belgium, provides the
base of the ptb’s support. The region was the centre of continental
Europe’s Industrial Revolution; now it is the apogee of deindus
trialisation. Disaffected voters in depressed regions have been
fodder for the radical right across Europe. Canny politics from the
far left in Belgium has flipped that trend, dragging voters to the
other side. In 1869 Karl Marx called Belgium the “the snug, well
hedged, little paradiseof the landlord, the capitalist, and the
priest”. In 2021 Belgiumoffers the eu’s best hope for the ideology
that bears his name.nCharlemagne
Local politics, force of habit and canny strategy help Europe’s communists cling on