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    By Serge Truffaut
    Le Devoir

    Wednesday 30 April 2008

    For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the municipality of Rome will be led by the right. And not just any right. In fact, the citizens of the capital have just elected Gianni Alemanno as mayor, a man reputed to be to the right of Gianfranco Fini's right-wing National Alliance (AN). De facto, thanks to the legislative and municipal elections, Silvio Berlusconi and his allies have hijacked all the influential positions in the country.

    That said, the gap observed between Alemanno and his opponent, former number two in the Prodi cabinet and former minister of culture, confirms the collapse of Walter Veltroni's Democratic Party. Before the beginning of the legislative campaign, Veltroni was mayor of Rome. Here and there, people assert that Veltroni's expressed desire for independence from all the parties that formed the coalition that bore Romano Prodi to the leadership of the government two years ago has proved disastrous. By adopting a strategy of break up with the left and center left parties, Veltroni promoted this tidal wave of the right.

    This rise in power of a political faction that has made insecurity and the rejection of certain classes of immigrants its trademark portends some jack-booted tomorrows. The ministerial promises the future head of state has made to Northern League leader Umberto Bossi serve as evidence. The latter will acquire the post of vice-prime minister and minister of reforms, while one of his League confederates will be minister of the interior. This party that cultivates xenophobia and anti-Europeanism is also supposed to obtain the Immigration portfolio and, possibly, the Justice portfolio.

    Strengthened by its breakthrough in the legislative elections and stunning victory in Rome, the National Alliance is in a position to negotiate its position in the next Berlusconi government at a high price. It is known that Fini will occupy the coveted chair of Parliamentary president and that a good number of his lieutenants will become ministers. And not just of those portfolios intended for walk-on parts.

    If one trusts the results of recent elections, it is decreed in heaven that security and immigration policies are going to be executed firmly. As for the economy - the challenge of the moment, and even of the years to come - there's complete confusion. Something that is all the more surprising given that Italian GNP growth over the course of the last decade has been inert. In a word ... astonishing ... As an artist of demagoguery, Berlusconi has taken care to avoid announcing the measures the nation's economic health requires.

    That being the case, the adhesion of a majority of Italians to theses based on a certain rejection of the European Union suggests that somewhat stormy debates with Brussels and its European partners are in the offing. One thing that's certain is that in Italy, as in many other countries, withdrawal into itself has won out against construction of Europe.

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    Goodbye to Anti-Fascism
    Le Monde | Editorial

    Wednesday 30 April 2008

    Gianni Alemanno's arrival at the Campidoglio, Rome's town hall, constitutes a premiere in the history of the Italian Republic. It's certainly not the first time that the highest magistrate of the Eternal City has belonged to the right. It took until 1993 and the election of Francesco Rutelli, this year's losing candidate, for the left to win out over the Christian Democrats. However, since Mussolini's fall in 1943, Rome's mayors all came from what people agreed to call "the Constitutional Spectrum," that is, the parties that had participated in the Resistance and the foundation of the Republic in 1946. The array ranged from Christian Democrats to Liberals, from Socialists to Communists.

    Mr. Alemanno does not belong to this family. He's a former youth leader of the (neo-fascist) Italian Social Movement that for years brought together those still nostalgic for Il Duce and their heirs. Undoubtedly, the new mayor of Rome has followed his leader, Gianfranco Fini, in his march towards Republican respectability - which took him from veneration of Mussolinian emblems to a ministerial position. He owes his victory less to his former convictions than to the weak mobilization of the left, stunned by its defeat in the recent legislative elections.

    A tradition is no less broken and at the very moment, April 25, when, as every year, Italy celebrates its Liberation. And, as happens every year, that celebration provoked arguments between a left that can't get beyond its myths of the Resistance and a Berlusconian right that, relentless in denigrating the left and undermining its historic legitimacy, has gone so far as to rehabilitate post-fascism's "lost children."

    With Silvio Berlusconi's return to power, the election to mayor of Rome of a former neo-fascist and the arrival in Parliament of two parties that purport to transcend the traditional left-right divide, a period of Italian history really is closing. The one for which, beyond any partisan rivalries, anti-fascism was the cement of political society. Sixty-five years after the fall of Mussolini, it's inevitable, and perhaps, desirable, as long as the myth is not replaced by the absence of historic consciousness.