[R-G] FT: "Fascists and Jews United for Rome Mayor"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

In the recent elections in both Italy and the United Kingdom, the
Right, both soft and hard, won a dramatic victory, and all currents of
the Left lost.  IMHO, the Left of the global North has yet to come up
with a principled and yet popular program on the intertwined questions
of Israel, Islam, and immigration, and the lack of it doesn't bode
well especially when economic anxiety is on the rise, these two
elections may very well be harbingers of worse things to come. --
Yoshie

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4d07386e-19fd-11dd-ba02-0000779fd2ac.html>
Fascists and Jews united for Rome mayor

By Guy Dinmore in Rome

Published: May 4 2008 19:18 | Last updated: May 4 2008 19:18

Rome's election last week of its first rightwing mayor since the time
of Benito Mussolini has been celebrated by fascists as a historic
victory over the left.

Packs of young, thuggish supporters of Gianni Alemanno greeted the new
mayor's appearance at the Campidoglio city hall with straight-armed
"Roman" salutes, shouting abuse at communists and immigrants.

"Before, if you were a fascist you had to pretend to be part of the
mainstream to have respectability. Now they are coming out of the
closet," said an aide to the defeated centre-left candidate, Francesco
Rutelli.

Debate over the significance of the National Alliance's first election
victory in a major city has been intense – especially among the
capital's small but important Jewish commun­ity, which is widely
thought to have swung in Mr Alemanno's favour. Rome's Jewish voters,
numbering about 9,000, explain their shift to the right in various
ways, most often because they see the National Alliance as firmly
pro-Israel.

Michel Bokhobza, whose family fled from Libya to Rome in 1967 in the
wake of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day war, says Italy's centre-right is
much closer to Israel than the pro-Arab bias of the centre-left.

"Even if his past was very close to fascism and ex-fascism, Alemanno
belongs to the coalition guided by [Silvio] Berlusconi and
[Gianfranco] Fini," he said, referring to the People of Liberty
alliance that also swept national elections last month.

Mr Bokhobza had always voted for centre-left candidates for Rome
mayor. Giving his second reason for changing, he said they had not
managed the city well. "The ideology of politics is finished," he
added.

Sandro Di Castro, president of the Jewish community's Bene Berith
association, says the present sense of danger posed to Israel by
Islamists and Iran outweighs memories of the more distant and tragic
past of the mass deportations from Rome by the Nazis and Mussolini's
anti-Jewish race laws.

Times had changed, he said, since 1993 and the first open elections
for Rome. The right's candidate then was Mr Fini, now leader of the
National Alliance, who at that point was part of its neo-fascist
predecessor, the MSI, the direct heirs of Mussolini.

"Fini was then seen as a demon and neo-fascist," said Mr Di Castro.
The "turning point" came in 1995 when Mr Fini became head of the new
National Alliance and started to steer it towards the mainstream. That
process was completed in 2003 when, as deputy prime minister in the
second Berlusconi government, Mr Fini denounced fascism as an
"absolute evil" in a ground-breaking visit to Israel.

Mr Alemanno's personal journey is less certain. Leftwing commentators
have called the 50-year-old former agriculture minister fascist,
neo-fascist and post-fascist – in the 1980s he headed the sometimes
violent youth wing of the MSI in Rome.

But, campaigning on a law-and-order platform, he was also astute in
courting the Jewish vote, promising to continue school visits to
Auschwitz and to complete work on a Holocaust museum in Rome.

Dominique Sicouri, from Egypt's Jewish community, says her "heart is
with the left" but she still decided to work with Mr Alemanno in
building ties with France's ruling UMP party, for which she acts as
spokeswoman in Italy. She sees Mr Alemanno as intelligent, serious and
a pragmatic moderniser. His Jewish supporters say that in power he
will be better placed to rein in extremism. If he fails, they will be
among the first to desert him.

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>