W. European capitalists search for political answers

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Thatcher's partial victory over the steelworkers has not had the effect of firing the bourgeois rulers of the rest of Western Europe with the self-confidence it so sorely needs.

Recent weeks have seen several significant events in many quarters which illustrate the way in which the maintenance of bourgeois rule remains deeply problematic.

If Thatcher is still basking in the gains she has made in steel and BL, virtually no other Western European government can today feel even the limited comtort which she does.

In France, the relations between the two main bourgeois parties in the government coalition-the Gaullist RPRand Giscard's Republican Party -are growing increasingly bitter.

President Giscard can no longer rely on RPR parliamentary support on major items of government policy such as the Budget.

There is increasing discussion of the possibility of i new government coaltion between Giscardians and Mitterand's Socialist Party.

Cold war

In West Germany, the deteriorating economic situation and pressures arising from Carter's cold war drive are threatening the future of Helmut Schmidt's right wing social democratic The far right winger Joseph Strauss is preparing to take over after the forthcoming elections.

In Holland, the right wing government remains under considerable pressure from national wage demands backed up by strike action.

All these governments, however, are relatively speaking, the stable governments of Western Lurope.

It is in Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal that the problems of bourgeois rule are today most acute.

Italy's 39th government crisis since World War Il has been resolved at whirlwind speed-largely, it seems, because of Italy's presidency of the EEC council of ministers.

The rapid setting up of another government under Francesco Cossiga-this time in coalition with the Republicans and the Socialist Party -doesn't even begin to resolve Italy's semi-permanent government crisis.

The Christian Democrats could hardly find a less reliable ally in government at the present time than the Socialist Of course the SP does have enough parliamentary seats to give the new coalition majority.

But it was the deep split the SP which led to the fall Cossiga's previous ministry.

Benevolent

The SP withdrew from its position of benevolent neutrality because the "left" of the party started arguing that the only government it would support is a grand "historic compromise" coalition including both Christian Democrats and Communists.

At least for now they have changed their tune and are Chirac (left) with Giscard willing to support the first centre-left coalition for a decade.

But while the "centre-left" formula in the early 1960s was trumpeted as a long-term solution to Italy's governmental problems, this time the trumpeting is very heavily muted. Nobody, not even the participants expect the new government to last more than a few weeks, or at most months, before it is broken apart by the same pressures which have destroyed its predecessors.

It is unlikely to outlast the municipal elections of June 8.

The main source of these pressures is the demand of the working class for a resolution of its pressing material problemsmass unemployment and inflatic n above all.

Its traditional leaderships in the CP and Socialist Party, crat) section of the coalition.

Martens has held on for two years on the basis of a plan for a major constitutional change which would make Belgium into a form of federation.

But now, with the detection from this plan of a group of Social Democratic senators, the plan is, it seems, definitively dead. A new crisis has opened which will be exceptionally difficult to resolve.

No new Martens has yet appeared from obscurity to hold the crumbling country together a bit longer.

It is also the problem of national self-determination which daily weakens the government of Adolfo Suarez in Spain.

After the dismal showing of his party in both the Basque and Catalan regional parliamentary elections, the establishment of a Basque "autonomous government" last week has not reduced the explosive implications of the national question.

The left petty bourgeois nationalist party, Herri Batasuna -the political wing of the terrorist organisation ETA (military) -is boycotting the assembly, a position which still has considerable support among sections of the radicalised masses in Euskadi.

The new Basque "government" takes office without any significant power and in circumstances where Euskadi remains under Francoist military and police occupation.

This makes it unlikely that the nationalist agitation in Euskadi which has several times in the last three years threatened to lead to a military coup by the right wing, will not be stilled.

Nor will the development of the economic crisis. The Spanish economy is now probably in as bad a state as any in Western Europe.

Inflation is close to 20% and unemployment has risen by nearly 200% since 1977 to an official (much underestimated)

total of 1.5 million.

It is the combination of the acute national question and the sharply deteriorating economic situation which makes the crisis of bourgeois rule in Spain today more profound than in any other country-reflected not, as in Italy and Belgium, in the form of a parliamentary crisis but of extreme lack of authority on the part of the government and evident readiness of

German righist Strauss

the military general staff to take political action.

It is this readiness_which also distinguishes Spain from the res of Europe, where, despite the increasing failures of parliamentary democracy from the point of view of the bourgeosie, the military are stil much less assertive than Spain.

Finally, in Portugal the continued failure of the bourgeoisie to redress the profound damage done to bourgeois rule by the revolutionary developments of 1974 and 1975 are being expressed in a new twist in the political crisis.

Last week military President Eanes,. in the name of the Council of the Revolution, vetoed the new far right-wing government's legislation designed to return significant nationalised sectors of the economy to the private sector.

Unsavoury

The news coincides with the discovery by the government of a far right wing candidate for the forthcoming presidential elections-General Antonio Soares Carneiro.

Despite his unsavoury record Carneiro, like Cossiga and Martens, is acceptable to the capitalists as a ruler because he is largely unknown-a fact which itself - reflects the profound loss of authority of Europe's capitalist class.

CHILE!

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