Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Despite polls showing a closer race, the right won a decisive victory in April’s national elections. Since then, it has launched unprecedented attacks on immigrants, especially Roma. Billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, a strong supporter of the Iraq war, will head the new government. His coalition includes the anti-immigrant Northern League and with the National Alliance, a party with roots in neo-fascism.

The left-of-center Democratic Party received only 38% of the vote. Its leader, Walter Veltroni, took a new tack by forming his coalition entirely around former Christian Democrats and former Communists, thus excluding the small Marxist left from even a minor role in his coalition. (This did not stop Berlusconi from comparing Veltroni to Stalin during the campaign, however.) Veltroni’s move to the right, which included his own attacks on immigrants, surely lost him some votes. But openly leftist parties also fared very poorly, resulting in a parliament without a single communist for the first time since World War II.

The results in Rome were equally disastrous, with Gianni Alemanno of the National Alliance elected mayor with a solid majority. Alemanno wore a Celtic cross, considered a symbol of fascism in Italy, while campaigning on a platform that included a promise to expel from the city some 20,000 immigrants, whom he blamed for an increase in crime. In a victory walk on election night National Alliance leaders led their supporters through the streets, accosting people who looked like foreigners and demanding to see their residence permits.

The Italian left is licking its wounds, mourning the “Waterloo” it suffered in April. Will the left be able to come to terms with the fact that anti-immigrant racism was the key to the right’s surprising victory, trumping opposition to both the U.S. war in Iraq and to neo-liberal capitalism?