Electricity not cut off for Communists - yet

The Washington Times reports:

The swing to the right in last month's presidential election and yesterday's parliamentary balloting have brought the French Communist Party -- once France's biggest political organization -- to the brink of bankruptcy.
Famously supported by poets and intellectuals including Pablo Picasso, surrealists Andre Breton and Rene Magritte, and poet Louis Aragon, the Communists were historically never short of a few francs. But they were always secretive about their funding, partly because some of it came from the KGB, the Russian intelligence service.
At the height of their power, the Communists ruled in coalition administrations and could make or break governments. When they ordered a strike, hundreds of thousands brought France to a standstill.
But now the party has been forced to acknowledge that things are "seriously tight" as speculation rises that it plans to sell such prized possessions as its emblematic Paris headquarters -- designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer -- and valuable art including "Mona Lisa With Mustache" by Marcel Duchamp.
In the "catastrophic" presidential campaign, party leader Marie-George Buffet ran up a $7.37 million bill that yielded just 1.93 percent of the votes. Under France's complex system of political funding, the collapse of support meant only $1.08 million was reimbursed by the state, rather than the $10.7 million the party would have received had he won at least 5 percent of the national vote.

The struggles of the non-working class.