these parties—especially the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in West Germany, the Christian Democrats (DC) in Italy and the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) in France—now had a near-monopoly of the Catholic vote. In 1945 Europe, that still mattered a lot: the Catholic vote was still heavily conservative, especially on social questions and in regions of high Catholic practice. Traditional Catholic voters in Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and southern and western Germany would rarely vote Socialist and almost never Communist.
