Italian Communists Setting Out as ‘Born-Again’ Party : Politics: They are embarking on a social democratic path under a new name--and an old leader.

After a prolonged identity search that triggered internal division and national embarrassment, the largest Communist Party in the West at last embarked on a social democratic path Friday under a new name and an old leader.

The open question now, after 15 months of public anguish, ceaseless rhetoric and vicious infighting that made the once-proud Communists the butt of every itinerant TV comic, is whether the newly named party is able to maintain communism’s historic support among Italian voters.

In their second attempt Friday, Italy’s former Communists, meeting as the born-again Democratic Party of the Left, reelected Achille Occhetto as their secretary-general with 376 of 524 executive committee votes cast.

“For those who gave us up for dead, today is the day of resurrection,” a pleased Occhetto said afterward.

The 54-year-old Occhetto spearheaded the name change to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra as a concession to changing times and new ideas in a prosperous, post-Cold War Italy. A party that won its spurs with its unremitting opposition to fascism, and polished its image with the able and honest administration of Italian city governments, slipped from 34.4% of the national vote in 1976 to 26.6% in 1987.

Italy’s free-thinking Communists became independent nationalists free of Moscow’s direction long before that became fashionable. With the collapse of communism elsewhere in Europe, though, the Italians, in their ponderous search for a new identity, have been badly overtaken by events.

At Occhetto’s behest, the 20th and last Party Congress last weekend voted the Italian Communist Party out of existence, over the objection of about one-third of the delegates unwilling to even nominally abandon their Marxist ideology and a commitment to class struggle.

The next day, though, party leaders inexplicably failed to ratify Occhetto’s leadership of the new party, which has joined the alphabet soup of Italian politics as the PDS. Along the way the party has scrapped its big hammer and sickle emblem for the environmentally friendly symbol of a leafy oak tree with a small hammer and sickle at its roots.

Party officials dismissed the weekend vote, in which Occhetto fell just short of a necessary majority, as a technical hitch: many of the delegates left before the vote, they said.

Occhetto’s resounding endorsement Friday may have mended some fences, but political commentators nevertheless predict a troubled and divided future for the new PDS.

Although excluded from any role in Italy’s central government since the fall of fascism, the Communists have been the second-largest vote getters at every election since World War II, trailing only the center-right Christian Democrats.

In proposing a name change that acknowledges a social democratic trend among today’s young leftist voters in Italy, Occhetto envisioned an alliance of the left that would offer an electoral alternative to Christian Democratic dominance that has now lasted nearly half a century.

The idea appears to have died aborning. Occhetto’s invitation to the Socialists, Italy’s third party, and a Christian Democratic coalition partner, has been met with scorn.

Ambitious Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, who himself hopes to lead a united left, has sniped mercilessly at the floundering Communists, calling their new name “undistinguished” and their new ideas “papist.”

Italian commentators say the new party lacks clear-cut policies and too closely resembles the old one, but with new, angry divisions. About 5% of the delegates to last weekend’s congress threaten to maintain a real Communist Party.

Other party members who have supported the name change don’t think that Occhetto has distanced the party sufficiently from outmoded Communist concepts that no longer appeal to an increasingly middle class country.

One liberal critic, longtime party stalwart Giorgio Napolitano, warned against creating “a badly disguised Communist Party” for whom America remains the “traditional bogyman.” Occhetto’s call for a withdrawal of Italian forces in the Persian Gulf--five warships and a squadron of fighter-bombers--and a unilateral allied cease-fire, drew criticism from many like Napolitano within his own party, as well as erstwhile allies like Craxi who called the proposal “senseless” and “isolationist.”