Angry Italian Voters Stick to Their Guns

A political wind of change swept through Italy on Monday as municipal election results showed that voters meant what they said two weeks ago: Traditional city governments must be thrown out and replaced with reformers pledged to rewrite the rules that have governed their country for the last half-century.

The last result to come in Monday morning from the election runoffs in 145 city races up and down the country was from the eastern Sicilian industrial town of Catania, long a bastion of conservative Christian Democratic rule and a stomping-ground of the Mafia.

But Catania’s Christian Democrats were not even finalists in the race, the first ever in Italy under a two-ballot direct election system aimed at picking an individual rather than a party representative to govern Italian cities.

The new-leaf winner with 52.1% of the votes was 42-year-old Enzo Bianco, who served briefly as mayor in 1988 and who is a deputy for the small, centrist Italian Republican Party. His supporting parties were an assortment of reformists and environmentalists and included the ex-Communist Party, now called the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).

Even the narrowly defeated runner-up, Claudio Fava, came from the new school of politicians promoted by a recently formed anti-Mafia reformist party, La Rete--The Network.

The runoff elections involved only between 6 million and 7 million voters, but their results were symbolic of the demand for change that has gathered momentum over the last 18 months. The old regime parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, hardly appeared among the parties that supported the winners.

A blitz of protests and calls for government reform has undermined those parties’ power to govern following judicial investigations, begun last February, that have revealed longstanding political and financial corruption involving almost 3,000 of the country’s leading politicians and business executives.

Voters expressed their desire for change Sunday by splitting their favors between populist federalists and reformist democratic parties and movements.

In northern Italian cities, the resounding winner was the populist Lega Nord (Northern League), whose candidate now takes over the city hall in Milan, Italy’s industrial and financial center.

Four other main northern towns fell to the Lega Nord, which seeks to decentralize power from what it deems the inefficient bureaucracy of Rome and give more autonomy to the rich and moneymaking north. It also espouses strict immigration controls, which has earned it accusations of racism.

Another big winner in Sunday’s vote was the PDS, the former Italian Communist Party, renamed and espousing social democratic principles. It generally formed alliances with other leftist and reformist parties, such as the Greens and the Popular Movement for Reform, to support candidates like Valentino Castellani, who was elected mayor of Turin, northern home to the Italian automobile giant, Fiat.

Gains in other northern and central cities confirmed the PDS as a rival to the Lega Nord.