Italy has had (at least until 1991) the world’s biggest communist party among non-communist countries (the region where I live, Emilia-Romagna, is often referred to as “red Emilia”, since it has always been a leftist stronghold and the communist party has dominated regional election for decades).
Anyway, I’d like to ask you about the popularity of communist parties in non former communist countries. Are they (or have they been) important in your country’s political scenario? I also know that the US government was well aware of the strenght of the Italian Communit Party. Therefore I’d also like to ask you of people in other european countries knew that Italy used to have such a strong leftist movement.
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During the Cold War, the main communist party (by that I mean the biggest one and that had contacts with Moscow and the DDR among other things, like having the party chairman visit North Korea in 1983) got about 4-5% of the votes in the elections. Post Cold War they got higher numbers as they shed the Communist name and now seem to be solidly in the 5-8% range.
This is the main party, there were other much, much smaller ones what got like… 10k votes or so and were the results of party splitting and ideological infighting (“You guys are fake Communists because you support the USSR and not Albania!” “No, Albania is not Communist, true Communism only exists in China!” etc etc). Those had no relevance whatsoever on the politics on the national stage.
The communist party won the elections here in 1946, the next time we had free elections was in 1990. The commies rebranded and stayed in the parliament until 2021, they are getting less and votes.
In the UK, practically non existent. Communist parties rarely stand candidates in elections, and when they do they do well to get 200 votes – our constituencies range from about 50,000 – 120,000 in size.
That said, the Labour Party (main left wing party) is a “broad church”, containing both centrists and more committed left wing factions. When Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party, the communists preferred to not run any of their own candidates, and instead support Corbyn. I don’t think Corbyn could be described as Communist, but it’s rare for UK parties to stand aside and support a different party.
They ruled in Spain along other leftists previous to the Civil War.
During the war, many areas were de facto ruled by anarchists, abolishing money and private property (not personal property, for those unaware of the difference).
After the war, they “educated” well the population into leaving them almost irrelevant.
Today, they are part of an alliance, which is part of another alliance, which is a minority part of the government. There is nothing leftist in them. All they care about now is capitalist induced ideas of identity, posturing, not giving a damn for the material conditions of the workers, the main tenant of the (true) left.
As far as I know the communist weren’t particular popular in our country. However there are small groups of people with communists. And they had their strongholds. Like for example East Groningen was traditionally ‘red’. Amsterdam is a leftist city as well. I know both the socialist party and the Green Party have their roots from the communist party. Both the socialist party and Green Party are more leftist social democrats I would say.
I knew there were some communist in Italy. At least I thought some leftist terrorist group were active at some point in history. Like in several European countries. But I didn’t knew to what extent communism was popular in Italy.
Quite low popularity if you look into their election results.. Since the labour party split in a socialist and communist part in early 1920s, the communist got max. 5-6% of the votes. Several of those that kept to the socialist path had been to st. petersburg in the years after the revolution.. Even norwegian PM for 25 years after ww2 had been there listening to Lenin. The labour party of 1930s even granting Stalins enemy, Trotsky asylum in norway. The comunist only went into a wide coallition government post ww2.. The labour party even condemning the comunist after the coup in czechoslovakia in 1948… Later in the 60s/70s the communists again got some attention, though not gaining a popularity.. Then many prominent figures among the norwegian communist rather looked to nations such as vietnam, china, camboadia and albania. Instead of the classic communist ussr. Quite absurd to see the picture of them greeting and meeting such as Pol Pot and Mao.. Probably not a “chess move” regarding gaining popularity for the communists…. In the 1960s you got a new party to the left of the labour party founded on resistance to NATO.. So then you had a party that would absorbed many of those that would otherwise probably voted comunist if they were not satisfied with the labourparty..
Anyways.. the key point is that the welfare state that was created in norway post ww2 was such good that the politicial forces most to the left (or right) had no chance of gaining any popularity. Though nowadays the communist party (now under the name Red) is on the rise..
Also “interesting” historic wise.. being so close to USSR and knowing that the labour leaders that would rule the country and keep the communist “away” in their youth had been so close to communism that they could smell the breath of lenin.
In Ukraine communist was always forced on us during the Soviet Union which didn’t allow it to just develop popularity naturally in the country, so it’s pretty unpopular
They weren’t that big in most of the country, they did have some success in regional politics, especially in the far northeast of the country, and that region still votes pretty left in the current landscape.
We did however have the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, which was a fake party set up by Dutch secret service to spy on China. And it worked. What helped is that only the leader knew the truth, the other members thought it was a genuine party. In Dutch it was known as “Operatie Mongool” (operation Mongol), the CIA knew it under the name “Operation Red Herring”, although the CIA has never confirmed their involvement.
In Germany, the SPD was originally a Marxist party. However, after the war in the 1950s in their so called Godesberg programme they left most of the Marxist ideology behind and accepted the social market economy. This opened a much broader voter base for them including large parts of the middle class who would have never voted for a Marxist party a lead to them entering the government and even occupying the position of chancellor in the late 60s.
Then there was also the hard core communist party KPD, however it was always just a fringe party in the post war federal Republic and together with an extreme right party is until today the only party that was ever banned by the constitutional Court in 1956.
In the soviet occupation zone, the SPD was forced to merge with the KPD to form the SED which was then for 40 years the source of absolute power in the GDR. After the collapse of the GDR, the SED renamed itself to PDS and later merged with the WASG which consisted mostly of former SPD members who were dissatisfied with the SPD to form die linke which is the biggest current socialist party but they are also struggling at the moment.
Then we have a few very small extremist parties like the KPD which emerged from the GDR branch or the MLPD, the Marxist-Leninist party, but they play basically no role.
We don’t have a communist party anymore, at least not one that would be relevant enough to mention or to know about. Maybe there is some small party, who knows.
But our former communist party, descendant of Yugoslavias communist party, slovenian branch, renamed themselves to “the combined list of social democrats”, pledged to be more democratic etc.
Then in 2005 they changed their name to “Social Democrats” and it stayed like that.
The party obviously still has some of the old cats from the commie era, but also new faces, one of them was our president Pahor, dubbed the instagram president, because he really liked to socialize, be a model and to dodge anything that could make him look bad. The party’s old members like Kučan, are frequently thought of as the “hand behind the curtain” or the “deep state”, by some more right leaning people who enjoy casual conspiracies, but other than that, the party is currently in the government coalition as the second biggest party and their leader is our foreign minister, Tanja Fajon.
They are far from actual communist ideas and embraced the social democracy so much, that we got another party called “the Left”, that wants describes itself as democratically socialist, or at least they used to.. They are also in the government coalition now, but only just, with about 5% support.
There is a nostalgic vibe around socialism here for some people, but also a dreaded period in history for others. We had stalinism in the 40s, with secret police hunting and removing “traitors”, then the 50s was a period of building infrastructure and the 60s was really nice for a lot of people, but especially for the higher up party members of the one and only party for the people.
Then it went all to shit with Tito’s death and rise of nationalism, that was dormant before, masked under the failed experiment called “yugoslav nationality”.
So communism is now more a thing for older higschoolers and people in their early twenties and heads in the clouds. Communism failed, but Marx is still popular among some students. Overall, I think people found value in balancing capitalism with socialism, to create money and have people taken care of by not killing off those who create the most. We have no billionaires here tho, so maybe that’s why it is easier.
1. Before Poland regained independence in 1918, there was a party named Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (it wasn’t social democratic despite the name). Rosa Luxemburg was its most famous member. SDPKiL supported global communist revolution and thus opposed Polish independence.
2. In 1918 they united with other far-left groups and formed Communist Party of Poland (KPP), controlled by USSR. It never gained more than 2% in elections and was dissolved by Stalin in 1938, during the great purge.
3. During World War II, Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) was formed and it was basically the same thing as KPP before.
4. In 1948, PPR “merged” with a pro-Soviet faction of more moderate Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and formed Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) which ruled the country until 1989. PZPR was dissolved in 1990 and changed its name to Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDRP). The party changed its name a few more times since then, but still exists and is present in parliament.
5. Some hardcore communists were not happy with that and founded Union of Polish Communists “Proletariat”, which returned to its traditional name Communist Party of Poland in 2002. KPP is irrelevant and doesn’t take part in elections as they wouldn’t be able to collect enough signatures. Somehow they are not banned despite being clearly unconstitutional.
*Well, you probably already know.*
After 1991 it’s the second most popular party but I wouldn’t call them communists anymore. Just another branch of the mafia that sometimes proclaims slightly different ideas and feeds on USSR nostalgia.
In Germany, the best result of the Communist Party of Germany, short form KPD, was shortly before the end of the Weimar Republic, when the enemies of democracy were growing stronger. The KPD achieved its best result in the November 1932 elections with 16.9%, already since the June 1932 election the enemies of the Weimar Republic, NSDAP, KPD and DNVP have a majority in the Reichstag.
Then the communists are persecuted by the Nazis and after that the KPD is quite weak in West Germany, it still gets 5.2% of the vote in the first election in 1949, after that 2.2% and then it is banned by the government, since 1968 there is the DKP, German Communist Party, but it was never relevant.
In East Germany, immediately after the war, the Communists and Social Democrats merged under Soviet influence to form the SED, but the elections were not free.
SKDL (Suomen Kansan Demokraattinen Liitto, lit. “The Finnish People’s Democratic Alliance) was an alliance of the leftist parties, Finnish Communists Party being the main party. At its highest, they gained about 23% popularity and they were party of a bunch of governments.
They had a complex relationship with the USSR, though they obviously had close ties to the Soviet politburo. During the 70s a more hardline faction called “Taistolaiset”, formed mostly by young radicals was much more pro-Soviet and caused the party to seem less government-worthy in the eyes of some other parties. Taistolaiset supported the sitting ~~autocrat~~ president who himself was backed by the Soviets *a lot.*
Personally, I think that SKDL was a necessary evil. Something that had to exist, a bit similar to our president who had strong backing from the Soviets. Finland was in a position where the Finnish economy relied on bilateral trade with the Soviet Union, but at the same time, Finns wanted to keep its distance from the USSR and try to keep as strong of a connection to the western world as possible. I can imagine that the cold war Helsinki was bustling with spies and other intelligence agents, would be interesting to have a movie about that era and how the western and Soviet intelligence agencies worked in Helsinki. There are surely countless of stories out there that would be super interesting to the wider audience.
Today, the legacy of that party is continued with the Left Alliance party which has been part of governments on and off. They do have one or two MPs who openly label themselves as communists but the party itself states that they are today social democrats.
Dutch, but went to school in Belgium. There was the official communist party in Belgium but it was very marginalized. It was funny to see though that for the Flemmish part they only had a foothold in 2 places, one of it was the village I went to school to Zelzate.
Ireland; not very.
Irish nationalism usually frames itself in left wing terms which sucks away some of the energy that communist parties usually rely on.
The Irish labour party had a lot of Marxism in its roots but that gave way to more if a trade union focused politics, and now they are a fairly bog standard centre left party.
The Dáil (Irish legislative body) has a small minority of trots and socialists that exist more as a manifestation of anti- establismentism rather than some deeply principled beliefs in socialism from the voting public
In Greece they are steadily around 5.5% for the biggest party, and then maybe another couple per cent for the rest 1000 fragments they have lol. Then we have the leftists who are not necessarily communists but they like several communist ideas like strikes, occupation of buildings businesses etc and unfortunately they are above 20%.
Very small today, only boomers and some students. We do have moderately popular Socialist Party of Serbia, successor of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. They were leading party in Serbia from 1990 to 2000 and lead Serbia into disasters. Today they enjoy just being relevant.
That depends on your understanding of what constitutes a “communist party.”
In Denmark, the OG communist party, the Communist Party of Denmark, never had much electoral success, until after WW2, due to their leading and important role in resistance to Nazi occupation (where all other major parties cooperated with the Nazis.) In the ‘liberation election’ of 1945 they garnered 12,5% of the popular vote.
Then their popularity dived again.
In 1956, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, a schism developed between the chairman, Aksel Larsen, and Moscow. Larsen, from being a staunch Stalinist, had, after the war, dabbled increasingly in Titoist directions, and was more of a “reform communist”(not to be confused with a Eurocommunist/”reformist” communist.) Among other things, Larsen believed communism meant to _expand_ democracy (as opposed to the cadre-model of the soviet party machinery,) expand it beyond the constraints of liberal parliamentarism, and formed the Socialist People’s Party (SF,) after being expelled from the Communist Party of Denmark. In the first 10 years of SF’s existence, it could still be considered a “communist party.”
In 1967, there was a schism in SF, regarding cooperation with the social democrats. The only left-wing majority in Danish history had been found following the election of 1966. The social democrats and SF had 89 seats together, and in addition to that, there were 3 left-wing seats from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. But due to internal disagreement regarding labour reform in 1967, the left-wing of SF split, forming _Venstresocialisterne_(The Left-Socialists, VS,) very much a party of “the New Left” and formed by western Marxist thought, in the lead-up to the events of 1968. They were in parliament, in and out, until 1987. After the fall of the USSR, VS, the Communist Party, and the Maoist Communist Worker’s Party joined together, to form the Red-Green Alliance, _Enhedslisten_, which is in parliament today, but has mixed electoral success.
We have a couple of communist ministers. The communist party is part of a coallied party (Izquierda Unida->Left Together) who is part of another coallied party (Unidas Podemos->Together we can) who is part of the current coallied government (PSOE+Unidas Podemos).
Said that, they are still a minority within the left so they are not pushing for communism but for a more social country.
We have the PCP, Portuguese communist party that still seats in the parliament, and until a few years ago even kind of rule in a coalition government. I say “kind of rule” because they didn’t have any minister.
They were a big part of the resistance against the dictatorship, up until 1974.
Nowadays they just seem out of touch with reality and rely on older people and unions.
The communist party is the only party besides the NSDAP that was banned in Germany. There is a marxist-leninist party that is basically irrelevant. The Lefts (Die Linke) is a very left leaning party that has communists in its rows and they score a bit over 5% on average. Their biggest success lately is the Bodo Ramelow is the minister of thuringia for the second time atm. But I have to add that he is way closer to social democrats than communists.
Before communism: Unpopular to the point of irrelevancy and even banned from the 20s onward. Only swelled after the Red Army came in, got some PCR members in gov’t and then they started to take over the country from the inside; membership swelled then, either by opportunists seeing the way the wind was blowing or through coercion.
After communism: PCR itself is banned and cannot really reconstitute, even though there are some minor parties today outright claiming its legacy. They are irrelevant however. Closest thing would be PSM (Socialist Party of Labor) led by former Communist PM Ilie Verdet participating in government between 1992 and 1996, after which it entered terminal decline
This of course barring quite a bit of PCR apparatchiks and potentates coalescing into the FSN, and hanging along as it evolved into FDSN, PDSR and ultimately PSD. Which is another story as it (unfortunately) tends to do fairly well for itself in elections, buoyed by its political machines.
Another wing of “dissident” FSN’ists ended up becoming PDL down the line, which had its high point in the 2000’s and early 2010’s before dying off after 2012. It merged into PNL in 2014.
So, the current government can be seen as not just USL (the unholy PSD-PNL alliance of 2012-14) reforming, but also as a bit of a FSN family reunion, and in both configurations it epitomizes the crooked establishment.
After the fall of SU our communist party changed name for several times. One time it happened in 2007 when they had about 1000 registered members but got only 600 votes in parliamentary election.
To compare – biggest party has about 15 000 members and two next about 10 000. Currently there is a new party that has about 900 registered members but popularity ratings are between 10-15% To get seats in Riigikogu a party will need more than 30 000 votes.
It was the only legal party between 1944 and 1989. The fact that it lost all relevancy and now only like a thousand people in the entire country support them should tell you about how legitimate its rule was.
Communism was pretty strong in Greece as far as I know. Of course there was EAM/ELAS during WW2 but not all members where communists and some just wanted to fight for freedom (my family for example). After that there was the Greek civil war which hurt their reputation pretty badly and the resulting red scare turned into a fascist junta which resulted in protests etc which where supported by the prohibited Communist Party. Then democracy set in again and today the communist party is pretty irrelevant. It has some strength but of course can’t really compete with the major parties
In Austria they’re pretty weak except in on major city where they head the local government. But only because they made the wise move of distancing themselves from communist experiments, which the party on a nation wide level still refuses to do. I mean we have a KPÖ office in our city but they’re still irrelevant
The Austrian communist party (KPÖ) never got a lot of voters iirc. They never held a single mandate in the first Republic. They were technically ruling alongside the socialdemocrats and the conservatives for a bit after ww2 due to the way the government was organised at the time, and I think some regional/state governments since, but they never really had much going for them tbh.
Especially since they had too close relations with the Soviet Union/their communist party post-ww2 with very heavy Stalinist streams all over due to that connection. Its still very noticeable in some of their branches though I think it varies a bit more nowadays. Either way, they don’t have much of a chance, they rarely get over 2% of votes in national elections.
Also, the founder of the Socialdemocratic Party, Victor Adler, who presumably just had unhealthily high charisma, managed to talk a lot of the different left-wing groups/streams around Cisleithania into joining that party together. So now the Socialdemocratic Party has a Marxist wing, for example. As a result, the Communist Party lost even more potential voters.
The only noteworthy exception is the Styrian Branch, which somewhat seperated itself from the rest of the KPÖ at some point in the 70s (iirc?). They managed to gain a decent bit of popularity recently, especially around Graz (Styrias capital). They won the last election there last year with almost 29% of votes and now have the mayor position.
They had a total of five MPs in parliament from 1920 to 1950, but only at most two at one time. The first defected party, the second was elected without a Labour candidate opposing them, the third defected party but was re-elected when Labour didn’t run any opposition and was rhen defeated by Labour at the next election. Fourth was the only one to defeat a Labour candidate and held the seat before was defeated by Labour, the fifth one defeated a Labour candidate but lost at the next election.
There was also the Independent Labour Party for a while, they had a few MP in the inter-war years, and one random MP in 1974
We used to have ideology affiliation for independents on the ballot paper, so you’d have Independent Nationalist, Independent Liberal etc. The affiliation thing stopped because it apparently confused people. We used to have a lot of these independents win seats, but never an independent communist or socialist
In Portugal, it was also quite strong in certain areas of the country, but never enough to have meaningful government control. Although during the Carnation Revolution, the communist party had a hit list if they were to have taken over.
Kind of tells you all you need to know about the communist party in Portugal and other countries.
Nation wide not that popular, but in my city (second largest of the country) they got more than 50% during the last mayor election.
Though I think not because they are communist, but because they are very down to Earth and after decades of corruption at the hands of a conservative party feel very honest in comparison.
In Hungary, there is one openly communist party (Hungarian Labour Party) which always performs 1%.
There are the Hungarian Socialist Party which had a very high popularity a few years ago but nowadays it stands around 3%. By the way this party is the successor party of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. It was the state party before 1989.