DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF THE LEFT

Italian Partito Democratico Di Sinistra, formerly (192191) Italian Communist Party, second largest of Italy's two major political parties and western Europe's largest communist party. Dissidents of the Italian Socialist Party's extreme left wing founded the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) in January 1921. The new party matured quickly, sending deputies to parliament before Benito Mussolini's Fascists outlawed all political parties in 1926. After that year, the PCI went underground to establish an organization that later proved important to the Italian Resistance. After World War II, the PCI joined five other anti-Fascist parties in coalition governments until May 1947, when the Christian Democrat premier Alcide De Gasperi excluded both the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party from a new government. The PCI's consistent success at the polls ensured that it would continue to influence Italy's political life. In particular, the communists' ability to win votes away from the socialists' left wing affected the policies of that important party. In 1956, when the revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes was followed by the Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian revolt, communist leader Palmiro Togliatti helped dissociate the party from the Soviet Union by proposing the concept of polycentrism, a form of limited independence among communist parties. After Togliatti's death in 1964, the PCI nearly split into Russian and Italian wings over this concept. Despite this conflict and other splits to the left, the PCI won 26.9 percent of the vote in the 1968 parliamentary elections. This victory, together with the PCI's apparent acceptance of democratic processes in 1969, raised the question of communist participation in governmenta question that bitterly divided the governing coalitions thereafter. Enrico Berlinguer, who led the party from 1972 until his death in 1984, became one of Europe's leading proponents of Eurocommunism, or national communism, which advocated the flexible adjustment of communist principles to national or local needs and conditions. By the late 1980s, events in eastern Europe made the communist label increasingly distasteful to many in the party. In an effort to consolidate left-wing forces and to create a broader base for opposition to the Christian Democrats, the party changed its name in 1991.