EUROPE : Italy’s Far Right, Left Harness a Whirlwind of Voter Protest

For decades, the rundown outdoor market on Via Sannio has been the best place in town to buy cheap shoes and coats of dubious provenance but enduring value. On a raw winter’s morning, right-wing mayoral candidate Gianfranco Fini, impeccably dressed and improbably center stage, is besieged the instant he sets a well-shod toe on the cold cobblestones.

Market spokesman Rodolfo Stivala hurries over to recount hygiene, fire and safety hazards that generations of city governments have ignored despite high-flown promises. Puffing a cigarette, Fini listens well and asks good questions. Cameras press close, the crowd swells. Some stall owners applaud; others turn away to avoid meeting him.

Fini gracefully disabuses a Dutch television reporter who asks if he is an anti-Semite. He banters with the market drunk, does not rise to heckling from a grizzled neighborhood madman and after a patient hour is whisked away for the next stop on a long search for mainstream acceptance in a democratic society.

After nearly five decades on the margin of national politics, these are heady days for the political heirs of fascist Benito Mussolini, led now by Fini, who was not even born when partisans strung up the old dictator by his heels in 1945.

The Italian right, together with its historic former Communist enemies on the left, are harnessing a whirlwind of voter protest that has suddenly transformed troubled Italy into a nation without a political center. Striving mightily to fill the vacuum, the two extremes dominate Sunday’s second-round mayoral elections up and down Italy.

Leftists supported by the former Communists are favorites in four key races that underline the disintegration of Italy’s political firmament. The centrist Christian Democrats, mainstay of every Italian national government since World War II, including the current one, are conspicuous by their absence.

The left’s opponents in Rome and Naples are neo-fascists. In Venice and Genoa, the vote is between the left and the autonomy-minded Northern League, which wants to restructure Italian government along regional lines.

Confidence in the Christian Democrats and their electoral allies collapsed amid a 21-month investigation that has implicated more than 3,000 politicians, business leaders and government officials in a vast scandal in which uncounted billions of lire were paid as kickbacks for public contracts.

As candidates wound up their campaigns this week, Paolo Cirino Pomicino, a former Christian Democrat Cabinet minister, told judges in Milan that he had received more than $4 million last year in government bonds from the director of the Ferruzzi agrochemical empire to illegally underwrite campaign expenses.

Sunday’s elections will be the last major sampling of Italian discontent before national elections, probably in February, which promise to be the most revolutionary in nearly half a century: No one can be sure what sort of government they might produce for a country that is beginning to look ungovernable.

Fini’s Italian Social Movement, which rejects the neo-fascist label and projects itself as a progressive conservative party, got its usual small vote (5.4%) in the national elections of April, 1992. But two weeks ago, it became nominally the largest political party in Rome as the articulate Fini, 41, drew 35.8% in the first round of mayoral elections.

In the runoff Sunday, Fini is slight underdog against Francesco Rutelli, 39, a windy Green supported by five leftist parties, giant among them the former Italian Communist Party.

The Rome race mirrors one in Naples, where Alessandra Mussolini, 30-year-old granddaughter of the dictator, is in a runoff against favored Antonio Bassolino, 46, apparatchik of what was once the largest Communist party in the West and now--renamed as the Democratic Party of the Left--is officially social democratic.

In Venice, former Communist Massimo Cacciari, a young philosophy professor, is expected to defeat businessman and political newcomer Aldo Mariconda of the Northern League. In Genoa, Adriano Sansa, a judge backed by the left, is favored over the League’s Enrico Serra, a medical doctor.