Italian Communists Transformed

The Italian Communists have finally tied the knot. Led to the altar by a new secretary general, Achille Occhetto, the party (PCI) has unmistakably espoused West European social democracy.

The prenuptial maneuvers had dragged on for years, with a squeamish part of the PCI still clinging to the notion of a terza via—a third road that ran somewhere between revolutionary communism and reformist social democracy.

That notion has been abandoned. Upon his election in June 1988, Ocche...