Communism has sometimes succeeded as a scavenger, but never as a leader. It has never come to power in any country that was not disrupted by war, internal repression or both.
—John F. Kennedy, July 2,1963
It is doubtful that an American President could confidently make that kind of statement today. In a handful of European countries, Communist parties are approaching the threshold of political power—not at the barrel of a Soviet cannon but in open and free elections. As a result, the specter of a Communist presence in Western Europe is stirring more concern and debate than at any time since the early years of the cold war, when the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and the Atlantic Alliance blocked Moscow's attempts to suborn democracy in France, Italy and Germany. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger broods about this new Red menace in background talks with newsmen and in conferences with aides and U.S. ambassadors, at which he has called the Communists the Trojan horses of totalitarianism and NATO officials meet secretly to discuss the Communist threat. The focus of the debate: How dangerous would it be if the Communists came to power and what should and could be done to prevent it.
The country most likely to vote Communists into office is Italy. Such an occurrence would greatly encourage the French Communists, who for almost four years have been closely allied with the Socialists. In Portugal, the Communists have been in the government since the 1974 coup, and Spain's Communists (though still underground) have formed a coalition with left and center groups.
The Communist gains are, to some extent, the result of local conditions. In Italy, for example, there is dissatisfaction with the flabby, scandal-ridden 30-year dominance of the Christian Democrats. Western Europe's Communist parties, though, have also benefited from the policy of detente with the Soviet Union. Just as the Russians are now said to be less threatening to peace, local Communists—who were long suspected by many voters because of their tie-in with the Kremlin—similarly seem less dangerous. Moreover, a new generation in the West is too young to remember the militantly Stalinist attitudes and often violent actions of Communist parties in both Western and Eastern Europe in the post-World War II years.
The Communists have deliberately tried to make themselves appealing to a wider spectrum of voters. The Italian and French parties have explicitly disavowed the old Marxian dogma of a dictatorship of the proletariat as well as the need for violent revolution. Instead, they claim to be committed to such democratic principles as political pluralism and freedom of speech and religion. Italian Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer—perhaps Western Europe's most articulate advocate of "socialism with a human face"—has often proclaimed his commitment to "a pluralistic and democratic system." He most recently and dramatically reaffirmed this in Moscow, at the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.