Letter from Italy
With Silvio Berlusconi's government embroiled in fresh controversy, new struggles are taking off, writes Phil Rushton.
Photo: Elizabeth Austen
In the months after the election of the Berlusconi government in 2008 an overwhelming sense of gloom took over the Italian left. But in recent months those clouds of despondency have been progressively blown away. That's not to say that there's been a wholesale recovery of the kind of optimism that pervaded the left during the growth of the anti-capitalist and especially anti-war movements between 2001 and 2003, but in the space of a year things have changed markedly.