Depth of Voter Protest Leaves Italians at a Loss for Words

It may seem as unlikely as Luciano Pavarotti running out of tunes, but Italian commentators have run dry of adjectives to describe the voters’ revolution that is convulsing a rigid political system bred to glacial change during half a century of Cold War.

Having stripped their quivers of the likes of shock , drama , and earthquake , to characterize earlier citizen assault on corrupt bastions of power, only hyperbole can now adequately describe mayoral elections Sunday that turned the political universe topsy-turvy.

“A cataclysm, a nuclear explosion, a big bang,” offered editor Paolo Mieli in a front-page commentary Tuesday in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.

In the first elections under reforms that enable Italians to choose their mayors directly--voting for candidates instead of parties--the real winner was people’s protest.

Runoff candidates in the three biggest cities, Milan, Turin and Catania, are all supported by upstart parties and movements. Candidates backed by parties that have run Italian governments since World War II were all but ignored.

It is hard to overstate the depth of Italian protest: Four mainline parties that hold a comfortable majority in a national Parliament elected last year now represent an estimated 20% of the national electorate, on the basis of Sunday’s returns.

Milan voters, as a case in point, massively shunned Establishment parties in their search for a mayor: Scandal-tarred Socialists, long the dominant political force in Italy’s industrial and financial capital, were practically annihilated.

It was in Milan that a corruption scandal erupted last year that has by now damaged virtually every major political party in a national web of bribes and payoffs by business executives to government officials for public contracts.

Milanese voter disgust found loud echo among more than 10 million of their fellow voters in three dozen major cities and in more than 1,000 towns and villages from the Alps to Sicily.

Voters who savaged the Socialists were nearly as tough on their Christian Democrat allies, who have dominated every one of Italy’s 52 postwar governments.

The brash new kids on the block in Milan and other northern cities are the Lega Nord (Northern League), a protest movement that calls for a federalized state with decentralized powers and greater regional autonomy.

“The Lega Nord is the new political center,” exulted Sen. Umberto Bossi, the party’s brash, outspoken founder.

In the flux, the former Communists did better than expected, not only in the “red belt” of central Italy but also farther north. Also benefiting from the protest vote were hard-line Communists who could not stomach their party’s drift into social democracy and created an Old Guard rump party called Refounded Communism.

Only in two small villages did any candidate get the absolute majority needed for election Sunday. Everywhere else, the top two contenders will soon resume campaigning for the June 20 runoff.