MADRID–Nearly two weeks of communist government in the heart of western Europe and hardly a whisper of complaint. The media has barely remarked on it. It makes one long for some old Cold War warriors to step out, gird their faithful chargers, shoulder their lances and create some mayhem. Where are the hard questions and the hard knocks? Indeed, where’s the blood on the floor?

After all, not very long ago, (a short 20 years), Aldo Moro, the former prime minister of Italy and, at the time, the country’s most influential politician, was savagely murdered by a group of communist fringe militants (the Red Brigades) in what in all likelihood was an attempt (it badly backfired) to propel the communist party into power, as part of the so-called “historic compromise”.

Antonio Gramsci, the great founder of Italian communism, wrote in 1920: “Italy is truly prey to demoniacal spirits, impossible to control or comprehend”. Has nothing changed in Italy in nearly 80 years? There’s still the feeling of events uncontrolled. There is still a rigidly run communist party. One thing, of course, is different. An offshoot of the communist party, the Democratic Party of the Left, more professing social democracy than communism, has taken power. Nevertheless, many of its leading lights are former card carrying members of the communist party. The new prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, was editor of the party’s newspaper, L’Unita.

Another way to look at it is to conclude that there is nothing uncontrolled about this–perhaps it’s nothing more than placating almost every faction on the political spectrum, just one of those intricate games of Italian political musical chairs that no outsider can ever hope to understand–Henry Kissinger never could, so why should we?

In Europe, they are producing a modern grand opera–the creation of the single currency–and all the Italian political system can throw up is a cast of understudies from a libretto scripted long ago by a rejected playwrite. To have or have not capitalism is no longer a fit subject for modern discussion; to have communal ownership of the means of production is equally passe. So why on earth does Italy need communist government, even if it has changed its name and apparently its credo?

It is amusing–and instructive–to read back and look at what the more liberal Eurocommunists were saying 20 years ago. For example, the eminence grise of the Spanish communist party, Manual Azcarate, who spelt out in an interview with George Urban in “Encounter” “that once the contagion of a liberated Eurocommunism spreads through western Europe into eastern Europe, the U.S. and the Soviet Union will find themselves removed from the battlefield for the European mind. A Europe that is under socialist rule with the Eurocommunists dominant in eastern Europe and in alliance with other left parties in the west would remove the primary causes of east-west tension.”

This was a brand of socialist transformation inspired by Rosa Luxemburg, the leader of German communism in the early years of the 20th century. (It was she who warned Lenin that his type of communism would make the Soviet Union the most tyrannical regime in the world.) Azcarate believed this would lead to Soviet power crumbling and the Warsaw Pact disintegrating. “NATO, no longer necessary, would be disbanded.”

Of course, nothing like this happened. The Soviet system simply rotted from within without ever being touched by Eurocommunism, that never mounted to much of a determining political force anyway. But it was a good idea. At least it had the ring of originality.

Indeed, it had everything that the new prime minister of Italy and his party do not have. By comparison, they are merely warmed up soup.

Are they dangerous? Clearly the perceived accepted wisdom, both within Italy and apparently without, is that they no longer are. Somewhere along the line of evolution their fangs have been pulled and the poison sac removed. However, nothing can obliterate the fact that Mr D’Alema and his closest colleagues are part of a pedigree that can be directly traced back to a communist party that after the Second World War was run by Palmiro Togliatti who organised in Karlovy Vary, near Prague, a guerrilla training school. The Italian communist party of the Eurocommunist era and after may have been embarrassed by and even detested what came out of that school–the Red Brigades–but it can never fully disown them because they were its children.

Italian communists have always been opportunistic, even Machiavellian. Should we trust them now? Do we forgive and forget and wipe the tapes clean without any more thought or debate?