Paris. -- There has been a moral collapse of the West European left, implicated in its near-total political collapse. The Socialist movement, which a half-dozen years ago was in power in nine of the 17 major West European nations, survives today as a member of only six European governments.
In two of those it is threatened. In Italy, where the entire political system is on the brink of a quasi-revolutionary reconstruction, the Socialist Party is deeply compromised by corruption. Former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi has had to take refuge in parliamentary immunity against the corruption charges brought against him by magistrates.
Spain confronts parliamentary elections June 6, brought forward by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales precisely because of the threat posed to his Socialist government by evidence of corruption among some of his Socialist colleagues.
There is symbolism in the suicide on May 1, the European workers' holiday of France's former Socialist prime minster, Pierre Beregovoy. The symbolism is that of innocence betrayed. No one believes Mr. Beregovoy corrupt, but his final weeks in government were overshadowed by the revelation that seven years ago, in order to purchase an apartment, he had accepted an interest-free loan from a financier of extremely doubtful reputation, nonetheless a longtime intimate of President Francois Mitterrand himself.
Mr. Beregovoy was from a immigrant working-class background and attended a railway trade school with the ambition of becoming a station master. Joining the Socialist Party put him on a different track, which eventually him led to the ministry of the economy and eventually to the prime ministry. In those offices he was constrained to adopt economic policies that seemed to many of the Socialist rank and file a contradiction of their own social reformism and of the utopianism of traditional socialism.
Many French Socialists blamed Mr. Beregovoy's commitment to economic austerity and a strong franc for the Socialist government's crushing defeat in national elections in March. Some Socialist deputies are said to have cut him in the halls of the National Assembly or refused to shake his hand. A conservative newspaper claims that President Mitterrand himself -- with whom Mr. Beregovoy had for years been closely allied -- made no effort to see Mr. Beregovoy after the defeat, and until the Wednesday before his suicide had failed even to return his telephone calls.
