The West is Red Again; A rancorous election in Italy, protests in France. The Bolshie old days are back.

Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Jacob Barigazzi in Milan, Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Tracy McNicoll in Paris)

The hammer and sickle quivered on wind-blown red flags as young men and women, shouting old slogans of revolution, marched through Paris to defeat the modest economic-reform program of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. That same flag was emblazoned on posters all over Rome last week as communists joined in an extremely slim--and still contested--victory by left-wing candidate Romano Prodi over right-wing incumbent Silvio Berlusconi.

To hear the billionaire populist, you'd have thought Western civilization itself was at stake. In language harking back to the red scares of the Great Depression and the cold war, Berlusconi warned that Prodi was just a mild-mannered front-man for wild-eyed communists in the mold of Marx and Lenin and Stalin. "In Italy," Berlusconi told NEWSWEEK earlier this year, "the left is not like the British left or the U.S. Democrats. The Left in Italy is still the communist left. The leaders of the left are the leaders of the strongest Communist Party in the West."

So, does Berlusconi (whose knack for right-wing rabble rousing is matched only by France's infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen) have a point? Is the extreme left that many thought was buried as a serious political force by the fall of the Berlin wall re-emerging to challenge ruling elites, and could it have a voice affecting all of Europe on issues from the economy to the environment and defense? Is the continent, in other words, about to live through a political dawn of the dead?

Actually, yes.

It's too early to say how loud a voice. But for several years now, the appeal of the far left to voters in France and Italy has grown. Middle-of-the-road socialists have been discredited by corruption and ineptitude, the staleness of their message and the ravages of much more organized right-wing political machines. In the French elections of 2002, socialist Lionel Jospin (after five years as prime minister) failed to make it into the second round when he ran for president. He lost too many votes to seven other leftist candidates, especially the feisty Arlette Laguiller (Workers' Struggle) and the young, charismatic postman-politician Olivier Besancenot (Revolutionary Communist League). The result was that ultra-rightist Le Pen ran against the center-right incumbent Jacques Chirac and the French, horrified on the left and the right, handed Chirac his second term with more than 80 percent of the vote.

In the four years since, many French socialists previously seen as pragmatic centrists have tried to shore up their far-left credentials. Former prime minister Laurent Fabius, aloof in manner as a Bourbon prince, seized the banner of opposition to the European constitution as a document that offered too few social protections to the masses. Former socialist Finance minister Dominique Strauss Kahn, once an avatar of economic liberalism within his party, has of late adopted rhetoric worthy of a Trotskyite. French polls, and most recently the success of the popular protests against the government's youth-employment law, reinforce the image of the far left as a rising force. An Ifop survey earlier this month showed 43 percent of French adults feel the extreme left enriches the public debate," especially when it comes to ...