Is Silvio's Italy Turning Into the Most Rightwing Country in Europe?

Shortly after Silvio Berlusconi was elected as Italy's next prime minister, the Guardian received a letter from a reader in the area round Venice, a stronghold of Berlusconi's allies in the anti-immigrant Northern League. The reader said his wife was an immigrant and doctor.

That day, a patient, whom she had apparently warned to take care of his health, had appeared in her surgery. "From now, dottoressa," he told her, "you're the one who's going to have to take care."

The success of the League (it won 28% of the votes in that part of the country) is one reason for thinking Italy has just become Europe's most rightwing country.

Ever since he entered politics, Berlusconi and his friends have been pushing back the boundaries of the say-able. Before the election, one of his candidates declared he had "never repudiated fascism". Berlusconi did not drop him and the candidate was elected. Berlusconi himself was restrained in the campaign (well, apart from calling his middle-aged women followers "the menopause section" and advising a young woman looking for a job to marry his millionaire son instead). But his victory two weeks ago has freed him to speak his mind.

It is expected that, in the next European Commission, Italy will lose the justice portfolio (which includes minority rights) but get the transport job instead. The prime minister-elect commented that, "It's much better for us to be concerned with infrastructure than homosexuality."

His first move after the vote was to invite his old friend Vladimir Putin to his villa on Sardinia where he laid on a show with scantily clad dancing girls. At a press conference the next day, a Russian reporter rashly asked her president about his alleged relationship with a young gymnast. As Putin scowlingly complained of journalists with "snotty noses and erotic fantasies" invading his privacy, his chum drove home the message by pretending to fire a sub-machine gun at the questioner. It reduced her to tears.

The next Berlusconi government will be further to the right than the last one because, unlike his 2001-6 administration, it will not have the relative moderating influence of his former allies in the Union of Christian and Center Democrats. Berlusconi's own loyalists aside, his new party, the Freedom Folk, was formed by drawing in former neo-fascists. They are led by Gianfranco Fini, who has recently been helping one of his followers to campaign to be Rome's next mayor. His most high-profile contribution? A "walkabout", surrounded by camera crews, demanding to see immigrants' residence permits.