Communists crushed as right risesFinancial TimesBy Guy Dinmore in Rome
April 15 2008
Italy’s elections sprang many surprises, none more so than the rout of the Communists and the parallel surge of the rightwing, anti-immigration Northern League which has become the indispensable partner for Silvio Berlusconi.
For the first time since the postwar republic was founded in 1948,
no Communists will be represented in parliament, their seats tumbling from 84 to zero. The Greens, partners in the Rainbow Left alliance, lost all 15 of their seats.
Fausto Bertinotti, veteran trade union leader, resigned as head of the alliance. Enrico Boselli quit as leader of the Socialists after they also lost all seats, confirming that party’s long decline.
Supporters of Mr Berlusconi celebrated the “revolution ... the final fall of the Berlin Wall in Italy”, and hailed what they see as his success in establishing a “normal”, bi-party system divided between his centre-right coalition and the centre-left Democrats. “The joke country of 1,000 parties and 1,000 governments is dead thanks to Berlusconi,” commented Senator Paolo Guzzanti.
Il Manifesto, the leftwing daily, said the Communists, in two years of coalition rule under Romano Prodi, had failed to deliver anything to their traditional supporters whose living standards were falling.
Many deserted the Communists to back the reformist Democrats, but in the north large numbers of workers voted for the rough talking, protectionist Umberto Bossi and his populist Northern League.
The League more than doubled its seats overall to a total of 85, becoming the third-largest party in parliament. Mr Berlusconi now depends on the League for his majority in both houses.
Mr Bossi has abandoned his calls for secession of northern “Padania” but pushes a regionalist agenda – in tension with the centralist National Alliance, another key coalition partner.
Mr Bossi on Tuesday repeated demands for fiscal federalism, a crackdown on crime and large-scale expulsions of immigrants, including European Union citizens.
Critics call his party racist and xenophobic. Senator Roberto Calderoli once took a pig to Bologna to desecrate land intended for a mosque.
Mr Bossi brought down the first Berlusconi government in 1994 after just six months. Relations were patched up and their next ruling coalition survived a full five years, from 2001 to 2006.