Italy rejects anti-migrant, far-right parties

Center-left mayoral candidate Roberto Gualtieri stands in a square in Rome, Monday, Oct. 18, 2021, where he is claiming victory after the first projections. The top vote-getters in the first round of balloting two weeks earlier, Enrico Michetti, a novice politician backed by a far-right leader, and Roberto Gualtieri, a Democrat and former finance minister, competed in the runoff Sunday and Monday. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Center-left mayoral candidate Roberto Gualtieri stands in a square in Rome, Monday, Oct. 18, 2021, where he is claiming victory after the first projections. The top vote-getters in the first round of balloting two weeks earlier, Enrico Michetti, a novice politician backed by a far-right leader, and Roberto Gualtieri, a Democrat and former finance minister, competed in the runoff Sunday and Monday. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

ROME -- Italy's center-left forces won big in Rome, Turin and several other mayoral runoffs on Monday, dealing defeats to the anti-migrant and far-right parties that are hoping to capture Italy's premiership in the next national election.

Roberto Gualtieri from Italy's Democratic Party trounced a challenger who had been selected by the Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist roots, to win Rome's City Hall, taking some 60% of the vote, with nearly all the ballots counted.

Democratic Party leader Enrico Letta predicted that the center-left wins over right-wing alliances will dampen any push by conservative forces, which include the anti-migrant League party, to hold an early national election. That enhances Premier Mario Draghi's prospects of continuing in office until Parliament's term expires in 2023.

Letta also interpreted the Democratic Party-anchored winning alliances as resounding affirmation of Draghi's tough anti-pandemic policies. Those include a recently implemented Green Pass decree that workers must be vaccinated, recently recovered from covid-19 or test negative for the virus to enter their workplaces. The rule has sparked protests, including violence, mainly by right-wing opponents.

"We [in the center-left] were on the side of broadening the Green Pass, on the side of the wide majority of Italians who want to work and want the country to be relaunched" by emerging from the pandemic, Letta told reporters.

The sole notable defeat for the center-left came in Trieste, where the center-right mayor, Roberto Dipiazza, won another term with 51.5% of the vote. Many port workers in that northeast city have opposed the Green Pass rule. On Monday, riot police repeatedly used water cannons to try to break up the protest, but demonstrators were still squaring off with officers into the evening.

In national opinion polls in recent months, both Matteo Salvini of the League and Giorgia Meloni of Brothers of Italy had been neck-in-neck in popularity. Meloni, whose far-right party is Parliament's main opposition party, bitterly opposed the Green Pass workplace requirement. Salvini, whose League is a Draghi coalition member, had sought in vain to persuade Draghi to soften the rule by making covid-19 tests free to workers who oppose vaccination.

"It had seemed inevitable" that for the right "the only question was who would be the next premier, Salvini or Meloni," said Letta, but he added that the center-left mayoral wins proved "rosier than any expectations."

In problem-plagued Rome, Gualtieri defeated Enrico Michetti, a novice politician handpicked by Meloni, who cited the low 40% turnout to diminish the Democratic candidate's victory.

"When the mayor of Rome is elected by 24% of those eligible to vote ... there is a crisis of democracy," Meloni said.

Gualtieri faces a Herculean task of cleaning up a city where trash and recycling collection is often inadequate, public buses have caught fire and broken elevators have put key subway stations out of service.

But "this city can be re-born," he insisted.

Meloni conceded "the center-right comes out defeated in these mayoral elections."

Salvini's northern-based right-wing party suffered some stinging setbacks in the mayoral races, including a resounding first-round defeat for his candidate in Milan, Italy's financial capital, which reelected its center-left mayor.

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