For the first time since the second world war, Italy, long the Western Hemisphere's most Leftist country of all, bar none, will no longer have a communist party in Parliament.

At the end of the "Catho-Communist" coalition government headed by Romano Prodi, Italian voters have signalled that they wish to make very sure they will never have to go through that experience again.

As party convergence and the electoral law pared the number of parties down from dozens to only about five or six, Italian voters have all, each from their different positions, stepped to the right.

Voters surged back to Silvio Berlusconi's party, now named "People of Liberty", which less than two years ago had narrowly lost to Romano Prodi's "Catho-communist" coalition. But, most remarkably of all, the radical Left has not even made it into Parliament, its votes sucked into the newly-founded Democratic Party, i.e. the often re-named ex-Italian Communist Party.

Since World War II Italy had always had the biggest Communist party of the free world, not to mention the sizeable Socialist Party, which was virtually swept away, along with the Christian Democrats, by the "Clean Hands" trials of the early 1990's. Fragmentation and public funding, since then, have meant a merry-go-round of party renaming that eventually ended the country up with not jut one communist party, but two, plus the leftists of the Green Party, plus, of course, the big "Democrats of the Left" Party, which was the new name of the Communist Party of yore, and today has become the Democratic Party. Confusing? Yes it is: not only to sedate foreigners but to Italians too, which is why we are all stunned by the enormity of yesterday's result.

As of yesterday's elections there will no longer be any purely leftist party at all in Parliament, but only the new "Democratic Party", reduced in size and headed by ex-Communist leader Walter Veltroni, and still under the presidency of Romano Prodi.

This outcome is decidedly more a mass rejection of the Prodi experience than any new-found enthusiasm for another Berlusconi administration.

Wrongly perceived by the foreign press as a dull "bespectacled bread mould" (the expression is from Britain's Daily Telegraph) professor Prodi, somewhat an Allende look-alike in more ways than one, had made it his business from the outset of his second term to keep the Italians' adrenalin flowing. From allowing an ex-terrorist killer to be named to the post of secretary of the Chamber of Deputies (the protests of his victim's widow to no avail), to letting some 24thousand delinquents out of jail and into the country by an act of clemency; from doubling the amount of marijuana people
are allowed to carry around on them without being accused of peddling it (40 doses a day) to compelling people to do most of their transactions through banks, his administration seemed constantly to revel in outraging the bourgeois.

In foreign affairs, thanks to the Prodi government, Italy no longer has troops in Iraq, but it now does have troops in Lebanon and has become the privileged Mediterranean reference point of Hamas, Hezbollah and Ahmadinejead. Mindful perhaps of Dostoievsky's cryptic prophecy of a grand destiny for Italy, Prodi flitted abroad practically every week of his tenure, visiting heads of state from Algiers to Peking, from Sofia to Cairo, from Moscow to Berlin and to all the capitals of the west and to the African Union. As, of course, like everybody else, Italy also had a Foreign Minister, besides a President of the Republic and a President of the Chamber of Deputies (of the now nationally-ousted Refounded Communist Party), who were wont to do some diplomatic work in Italy's name as well, this frenetic activity of their Prime Minister's had some Italians wondering whether he did, indeed, have a plan to set up a "Eurabia", as British writer Bat Ye'or has accused him of doing.

Another disconcerting trait of Romano Prodi's administration was that, contrary to Italian custom, qualified officials were brusquely dismissed from heading long-standing non-political positions in the national health service and, more threateningly, in the military, police and secret services: to all appearances merely to satisfy some thrist for power, an particularly uncoscionable idea in a government led by one whose identity to the public was mainly that of a liberal Catholic.

Most bewildering of all, to Catholic voters but also to many non-Catholics, was the failed attempt by the Prodi-led coalition to pass laws that thumbed their nose at Catholic sentiment, such as a law creating new rights for unmarried couples, whether homo-or hetero-sexual, and a law on euthanasia and "biological testaments". But towards the Vatican Prodi has always appeared to be ambivalent: glad as he was to get his picture taken with his family alongside the Popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI in turn, this gladness invariably dimmed down whenever an issue came up which would call for him to take a stance, his attitude turning non-commital at best. To a journalist who questioned him about this fact Prodi famously retorted "I am Catholic, yes, but an adult too".

In the end it was reaction to the above jolts, but above all to both the colossal budgetary laws that fleeced Italian taxpayers to the bone and to a perceived laxity on immigration laws, that the Italian political scene has now swerved dramatically to the right, doubling the MP's from the conservative Northern League and tossing off many prominent leftist gurus, including a few erstwhile Ministers in the Prodi coalition.

Nonetheless, Italians are well aware that while the Communists' presence in Parliament may be history (at least momentarily), Communist presence in the country is still hugely strong: in our many-tiered local administrations, in prominent positions in our newspapers, in public television (RAI's Channel 3 is permanently theirs), in universities and in schools, in the powerful trade unions, in the "social centers" of the big cities and, perhaps most importantly, in parishes, their hold goes mostly unchallenged. So, although grateful to Walter Veltroni for his gentlemanly attitude towards his opponent in defeat, something we are hardly used to seeing in our Leftist politicians, the fear that is now taking shape in the hearts of Italy's citizens is: can we really expect the proud and vastly active Italian Left to swallow the affront peaceably? Will they not very soon, in knee-jerk reaction, call an end to the truce they implicitly accorded to the Prodi Administration and its Communist ministers and find some plausible pretext to immediately take back to the streets once again - Alitalia will be as good a reason as another - as they are well known to be capable of doing at the drop of a hat?