The Communist Party had 2-digits percentage of votes in France until the 90s. We had coalition governments with communist (and green) ministers last time in 2002 I think? And one of the main newspapers, when people still read them, was l'Humanité, clearly further left than the mainstream left (parti socialiste, then).
Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop songwriters write a love song to it (Rouge) and it had the Red Army Choir singing there and sold a million discs on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(Fredericks_Goldman_Jo....
We still have 'revolutionary' communist (troskists, and other variations) like Lutte Ouvrière, la Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire at each presidential election, gathering between 3 and 6% of votes...
It is true that some did not oppose communism, but they were fortunately always a minority. They had a very naive and romantic view, which is easier when you don't get to suffer the oppression personally.
Sentiment about communism changes a lot. We, as western Europeans, haven't been brainwashed with decades of anti-communist propaganda, at least not to the level reached in the US, neither we lived under a communist regime, so we didn't develop extreme views until recent years.
A couple decades ago one could find here a good number of right militants among immigrants from the former communist countries. As much as I'm left leaning and heavily hostile to any form of right wing ideology, I honestly can't blame who suffered for example the Ceausescu dictatorship for leaning the other way; it's pretty normal to me.
Nowadays however the right wing nationalist ideology is developing support also among citizens of countries who never saw communism in all their existence, but that is the result of a subtle propaganda which I would date back in the early to mid 90s.
On one hand, you have "propaganda" (your words). On the other hand, you have those that lived under it. If the views of those align, there may be more truth to the anti-communist sentiment than plain "propaganda".
I bet if you broke down what they were specifically repulsed by, you'd get a response that aligned more with "we were affected by western sanctions and embargos that crippled our economies and made trade impossible" than "we didn't like communism." The US specifically hated communism because it's harder to extract resources from communists than it is to get it from oligarchs and kleptocrats. Hell, we spent a good part of the 20th century overthrowing democratically elected governments to put those people in charge while our leaders proclaimed how much they loved "freedom" back home.
Hate of communism was just never as rabid 'round here. In 1993 we had one of the mainstream pop songwriters write a love song to it (Rouge) and it had the Red Army Choir singing there and sold a million discs on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(Fredericks_Goldman_Jo....
We still have 'revolutionary' communist (troskists, and other variations) like Lutte Ouvrière, la Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire at each presidential election, gathering between 3 and 6% of votes...
Europe is diverse...