Berlusconi’s manifest silliness has concealed one of the more unpleasant by-products of his victory in the Italian elections. The Lega Nord’s leader Umberto Bossi has steered his party to a major electoral breakthrough – in fact he has even described his proto-fascist ragbag as the “new workers’ party” following the collapse of the “Rainbow Left” (Sinistra Arcobaleno).
As Lidia Cirillo, a leader of Sinistra Critica points out in her interview the the Swiss website A l’encontre the Lega Nord scored votes in excess of 25% in traditionally left-leaning northern Italian regions such as Lombardy and Piedmont as well as in its own strongholds. These are areas with a lot of medium and large scale industry. The aggressively regionalist party now has 23 senators and 46 MPs and scored just over 8% of the national vote.
This is indicative of just how disorganised the Italian workers’ movement has become. Berlusconi now has five years with a coalition that by Italian standard is miraculously stable. He won’t have to do the horse trading with the eccentric fringe parties which the Economist complained prevented him from being as energetically neo-liberal as Prodi. This gives him the freedom to go on the offensive and the fact that even the CGIL, the former Communist union federation, has major numbers of members who voted for Bossi will give him still more scope.
Lidia points out that Berlusconi’s coalition now has an openly racist party in government. She’s not wrong either. The front page of its website carries a story about how it plans to issue women with a protective spray. Good feminist stuff? Not really. It’s to protect them against attack from ” Romanians and other foreigners”. One of their MPs Paolo Grimoldi is coming out with rhetoric that not even the BNP uses here. An example from the same story has him talking about “cleaning up and getting rid of the gypsy camps”. This is his description of the shanty towns in which migrant workers live. Their website has the slogan “no votes for immigrants” and in one weird image has a picture of a native American with the caption “he suffered from immigration”. If memory serves a lot of that would have been Italians but to be fair they never earned a reputation for criminal activity in the United States.
The social base of the Lega Nord has been the small employers and owners of family size businesses. Now it has attracted a section of white collar workers and industrial workers. Pietro Basso points out in the interview in A l’encontre that Bossi was determined to rub salt in Bertinotti’s wounds by saying that “the proletariat is with us” and adding that “at least he new that Rifondazione’s old general secretary was a worker even if he and his party didn’t have any seats in parliament.”
Resentment against the amount of state money that was spent in the south was the Lega Nord’s old song. Its new tune is a racist anti-immigrant discourse that is shocking to those of us who don’t read the Daily Mail. Trite though it may sound it’s pretty obvious that the failure of the “soft left” and the abandonment of a perspective of class struggle has thrown a lot of Italian workers into its arms. There may not be much that we can do about that here but at least we should try to make sure that wherever the racist Lega sends its ministers outside Italy that they are made to feel unwelcome.
Liam redux 
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