Since the 1920s Garòsci had made no secret of his misgivings concerning the democratic and liberal credentials of the Italian Communist Party. The 1968 student protests, to which he was always hostile, triggered a hardening of his approach. Stalinist developments in tyranny, most of which he had experienced from the distanced perspective of exile in Paris and then New York, had triggered incomprehension and mistrust across the political left in western Europe as knowledge of the purges and the camps had seeped across to the west. The clandestine elements of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 became apparent only slowly, but there could be nothing clandestine about the Soviet take-over in central Europe after 1945. Elsewhere in western Europe, notably in West Germany, those awarenesses served to marginalise the Communist Party, but the Italian Communist Party continued to win between 20% and 30% of the popular vote in general elections through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Throughout the period, disagreement and unclarity persisted over the extent to which the party should be viewed as no more than a shameless proxy for still unfulfilled Soviet imperial ambitions, and how far it should be applauded for the relative efficiency and absence of flagrant corruption evident in many municipal councils controlled by a democratically elected communist council. During the 1970s Garòsci emerged as an uncompromising battling anti-communist, lining up with liberal-conservative elements in the process. His contributions began to appear in Indro Montanelli's Il Giornale. More rarely even lined up with Edgardo Sogno's "difesa democratica", which a decade or two earlier he would surely have condemned as "monarchist". By 1980 anti-communism had become the focus of his public agenda.