The local elections held throughout England on Thursday saw an absolute trouncing of the Labour Party, with the most notable casualty being London mayor Ken Livingstone, who has been replaced as of Sunday by Conservative candidate Boris Johnson. Johnson is going to be a real wild card because not much is known about what he will do. In fact his whole campaign seemed to be centered around making buses shorter, as far as I can tell. One thing that’s clear is that Johnson benefited from good timing, cashing in on widespread dissatisfaction with Ken Livingstone as well as Gordon Brown’s plummeting polls.But as Labour frets over the implications of having a conservative mayor for the first time since the office was created, on the continent the left is far more concerned about a different mayor recently put into office. It seemed to slip under the radar for the English-language press, but last week Rome elected a Neo-Fascist leader, Gianni Alemanno, as its new mayor. It is the first time since the fall of Mussolini that a Fascist party has attained such a high position of power.
In the early 1980’s Alemanno became well-known for leading violent fascist youth demonstrations in Rome. The young, square-jawed and handsome firebrand became a protégé of Gianfranco Fini, the rightist leader who later founded the neo-Fascist National Alliance party in 1993. Since then Alemanno has worked hard to become the legitimized voice of Fascism in modern Italy, appearing often on Silvio Berlusconi-owned television stations. Berlusconi later appointed Alemanno as agriculture minister in his 2001-2006 government.
