Historic Defeat for Social Democrats in Italian Election
NOVANEWS
Right-wing parties benefit from anger over austerity, inequality
By Marianne Arens
World Socialist Web Site
In the European Union’s fourth-largest country, amid mass poverty and unemployment and growing popular disaffection with the centre-left parties and their pseudo-left apologists, Sunday’s parliamentary election in Italy resulted in a historic defeat for the governing Democratic Party (PD) and a victory for the right-wing and extreme-right parties.
Italy’s desperate levels of social distress—with youth unemployment at 30 percent—are largely the product of policies pursued by centre-left governments. While right-wing governments under Silvio Berlusconi were characterised by unrestrained corruption, the names of the centre-left prime ministers—Romano Prodi, Massimo ...