Watch it, Italy

A strange mix of racism and authoritarianism is surfacing in Berlusconi's Italy

As parallels are constantly drawn between the current economic climate and the 1929 crash, we can at least hold on to the certainty that Europe is now a profoundly democratic place.

Italy, however, is a peculiar case. Since Silvio Berlusconi's landslide victory last April, it's as if the country started to passively give the nod to a disturbing series of populistic and semi-authoritarian measures. Whether it's style, rhetoric or actions, whatever the government is doing is increasingly greeted by a collective shrug. The result is that Italy's standards of democracy are lowering fast.

Berlusconi's victory wiped out of Parliament the radical and green left and dropped the decimated centre-left into a morass of petty infighting. That allowed the Government to hit the ground running. Propped up by the type of anti-immigration rhetoric that Britain would only tolerate if the BNP were in power, the new Italian executive agreed to some seriously draconian legislation. Immigrants are now officially b-citizens. One measure, for instance, requires their expulsion the moment they get a criminal record - and the grounds for appeal are strictly limited. In the meantime, reports of immigrant-bashing and racist incidents, in some cases involving the police, are just piling up.

In September, Giancarlo Gentilini, a pro-Berlusconi mayor (famous for his calls for "the right to carry out ethnic cleansing against the faggots") said: "I wanted our streets cleansed of all the ethnics groups that are destroying our country". He taunted the immigrants that "piss in our streets". "Let them go and piss in their own mosques", he barked, adding "I don't want to see any blacks, browns or greys teaching our children"… Only two months ago, members of the ruling Northern League, including MPs, took part in the pan-European far-right gathering in Cologne, the type of event you'd want to pop to if you fancied a picnic with the NF or Combat 18.

Next, the Government proceeded to set up 'special' classes for children of non-Italians at school. And while Berlusconi grabbed the headlines for calling newly elected Obama "suntanned", only muted grumbles met his new ad-hoc law that will grant the Italian Prime Minister (himself, that is) immunity from all criminal courts. What followed was the scandal at the Parliamentary Committee overseeing the state television network RAI. Even though the committee is traditionally chaired by an opposition MP elected on a bipartisan vote, the government rejected the centre-left's official candidate. Instead, they handpicked their own. This too was shunned by the general public as petty political squabbling.

And then came the student strikes. Unhappy with budget cuts proposals as detailed in the White Paper on higher education, undergraduates and college students alike took to the streets in numbers. And this is where it turns sour. After scuffles erupted in Rome when a mob of organised skinheads attacked unarmed teenagers (see pictures here), the hawkish former Home Secretary (and later President) Francesco Cossiga went on record saying that the best way to deal with such protests is to infiltrate them with agent provocateurs and shoot (or beat) at random.

"This is how I dealt with them when I was at the Home Office", he revealed in an interview. Cossiga was speaking of Italy's so-called 'years of lead' in the late 70s, at the height of the country's own terrorist crisis. Between 1977 and 1979, a period of high civil unrest, several demonstrators died in dubious circumstances. Some were shot by random fire during protest rallies. Although the courts were never able to convict anyone in particular, we now officially know that the government was directly behind it. In the words of Cossiga:

"The security forces should massacre the demonstrators without pity, and send them all to hospital. They shouldn't arrest them, because the magistrates would release them immediately, but they should beat them up. And they should also beat up those teachers who stir them up. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly lecturers, of course, but the young women teachers."

No doubt Cossiga is pleased that only in 2001, during Berlusconi's last stint in power, the Italian police pulled off that magnificent mix of Pinochet-style torture, mass-beating and planted evidence that stoked up the infamous riots at the G8 in Genoa. And they really did pull it off because no police officer will ever spend a minute in jail for that.

Yet, what's most disturbing is the Italian's sense of resignation, as well as Berlusconi's enduring popularity in the polls. The temptation is to say that, after all, Italy is the place where fascism was invented. But it wouldn't be fair on all the Italian trade unionists, socialists and liberals who lost their lives fighting for their freedom.