ABSTRACT
In Portugal, where none of the new parliamentarians want to sit anywhere but on the left of the elected chamber, the Socialist Soares is locked in a struggle with Communist-supported Army officers. Mitterrand is accused by Georges Marchais of seeking new allies "on the right" but in Italy it is the Communist Party who is offering the Christian Democrats a "Great Coalition". Soares was forced to break with "revolutionary" comrades under heavy pressure; Mitterrand still strains to maintain a fiction of unity and agreement. Unlike Cunhal who is an old Portuguese Stalinist with nothing but contempt for bourgeois democracy and its ways, Marchers recognizes the importance of a pluralistic democracy, and then goes on to praise his comrade in Lisbon. Dante might have suggested abandoning all hope if one tried, as an outsider, to enter into the internal political problems of Italy nowadays.
