A young graphic designer called Nicola Tommasoli died in hospital in Verona Monday afternoon, victim of a neofascist mob. After he refused to give a cigarette to a skinhead who approached him, five of them, captured by a surveillance camera, punched and kicked him unconscious. And when it emerged that they belong to a neo-fascist fringe group, Italians began asking themselves: Is this the first flick of the whip of the new regime, the first taste of what is to come?
The respectable right was quick to insist that the attack was nothing to do with them. “I would be the first to condemn neo-fascist violence if it really existed,” shrugged Ignazio La Russa, a senior figure in the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN), likely to be appointed a minister this week.
The key players in the new Italian right wear beautiful suits and pastel ties and take to the heights of institutional power like ducks to water.
Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome and now head of the Democratic Party which took a whipping from Silvio Berlusconi at the general election, spelled out the link between the men in suits and the men in boots: “There are lots of gangs like this and they are much more dangerous in a cultural and political climate in which principles of intolerance and hatred toward the weakest are affirmed...”
Yet Veltroni has much to answer for. It was his center-left regime in Rome which ran the capital for the past 15 years and whose skewed priorities made the right’s triumph possible.
Veltroni and his predecessor Francesco Rutelli — the center-left’s mayoral candidate beaten last week by Gianni Alemanno of AN — ran the city for the benefit of the post-communist intelligentsia, who lapped up the endless film and art and music events and believed it when Veltroni told them that “Rome is the locomotive of Italy”, and that culture and tourism were the locomotive’s fuel.
But meanwhile the majority of the city’s population were shut out of the loop. They lived outside the city’s exquisite center, in benighted and desperately ugly dormitory suburbs with pathetic transport links, scarce policing, negligent local authorities and every indication of official contempt.
And those nightmare suburbs continue to multiply. So now the Romans have risen up and thrown the champagne communists out. And the cry is out with the gypsies, in with the police; out with the 20,000 foreigners who have committed crimes; restore the city to those who rightly possess it.
The crude and simple appeal of fascism has always been to blood and soil, and so it remains today.
If Italy today has the worst-performing economy in Western Europe, it is thanks to the criminal failure of its politicians to tackle the special interest groups which hold the state hostage in every sphere of life, from trade unions to universities, from property development to the justice system.
Italy feels itself in decline and reacts electorally with a lurch to the far right, but as so often, everything must change in order that everything stays the same. Those responsible for Italy’s problems will continue to make hay just as before. Those who suffer will be those who are least to blame for the country’s woes.
