"“The workers don’t vote for the Left any more"

I know Italy's always had more of a far-left presence than the UK. But that seems to be changing.

Like the brown bear, the radical Left has disappeared. Communists and greens have vanished, at least from parliament. They do not have a single senator or deputy, or at least that’s how it was looking as the most excruciating, awful night in the history of Italy’s Left drew in. In the stunned eyes of the Rainbow people, the night was made even blacker by the triumph of Silvio Berlusconi, the impressive gains of the Northern League and the hard-to-refute claim of its secretary, Umberto Bossi: “The workers have voted for the Northern League”. Pause for effect: “The workers don’t vote for the Left any more. The Northern League is the new workers’ party”.