The World: Giscard: The Hard Road to Reform

It was a brief but telling European family spat. Asked on television recently about the Communist electoral threat in Italy, West Germany's blunt Chancellor Helmut Schmidt suggested that Communist parties are really a problem only in countries where there is "reactionary clinging to old forms and old attitudes"—citing, among other examples, France. Then, in a published interview which appeared last week, Schmidt added that he did not want Communists coming to power in places like Italy and France, but if they did get government roles, it would not necessarily be a catastrophe. That...

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