Founded 3 February 1991 Succeeded by Democrats of the Left | Dissolved 14 February 1998 Newspaper L'Unità | |
Secretary Achille Occhetto (1991–94)
Massimo D'Alema (1994–98) Preceded by Italian Communist Party | ||
The Democratic Party of the Left (Italian: Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS) was a democratic socialist and social-democratic political party in Italy. Founded in February 1991 as the post-communist evolution of the Italian Communist Party, the party was the largest in the Alliance of Progressives and The Olive Tree coalitions. In February 1998, the party merged with minor parties to form Democrats of the Left.
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History
The PDS evolved from the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the largest and most powerful communist party in the Western Bloc for most of the Cold War. Since 1946, it had been the second-largest party in Parliament. It had been moving away from orthodox Communism since the late 1960s, when it opposed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. It had been one of the first parties to embrace Eurocommunism. By the late 1980s, most of the PCI's contacts were with social-democratic and democratic socialist parties, and it was increasingly apparent that it was no longer a Marxist–Leninist party.
With this in mind, in 1991 the PCI dissolved itself and refounded itself as the PDS. Its first leader was Achille Occhetto, the final secretary of the PCI.
Although Ochetto had proclaimed the end of Communism, he tried to trade on the PDS' roots. The new party's logo consisted of an oak tree sprouting from the previous symbol of the PCI in a roundel at the tree's roots. This did not prevent hardliners leaving the party and launching the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC). Thus the logo was also adopted in order to prevent the PRC from making usage of the symbol immediately after the split between the two parties. In 1993 the party was admitted into the Socialist International and Party of European Socialists. In the same year the party's MEPs moved from the European United Left (GUE) to the Socialist Group in the European Parliament.
In the 1994 general election Occhetto was the leader of the Alliance of Progressives coalition, but lost to the Pole of Freedoms and Pole of Good Government coalitions led by Silvio Berlusconi, who became Prime Minister of Italy for the first time. In the aftermath of the election, Massimo D'Alema was elected new party secretary. In the 1996 general election, after the collapse of Berlusconi's coalition, the PDS was part of the winning coalition, The Olive Tree, led by Romano Prodi. In the Prodi I Cabinet, a leading member of the PDS, Giorgio Napolitano, became Minister of the Interior.
In 1997 D'Alema called for the party to become more of a European social-democratic party, and in 1998 merged with Labour Federation, Social Christians, Republican Left, Unitarian Communists, Reformists for Europe and Democratic Federation to form Democrats of the Left. On this occasion, the party decided to replace the hammer and sickle of its emblem with the red rose of European social democracy.