In Germany, the Greens have made their breakthrough. In Baden-Wurtemburg, with 25% vote they outpolled the Social Democrats with 23% and now lead a coalition administration with them. In Bremen, the Social Democrats retained their position as first party, the Greens came second and the Christian Democrats came third. In both cases the part of the left that grew and which changed things was the Green Party. The traditional Social Democrats trod water. The part of the right that declined most notably is the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party and to a lesser extent the Christian Democrats. The message is that neo-liberal economics have lost popularity more than old style social market Christian Democracy, while a new, alternative left led by the Greens has grown rather than traditional social democracy.

In Italy, the remarkable thing has been the decline of both Berlusconi’s People of Freedom and the racist Lega Nord. The big winner in the opposition has not been the leadership of the main centre-left party, the Democrats, but more personalised and postmaterialist political movements, mirroring the success of the Greens in Germany. A foretast of this occurred a year ago in the conservative region of Puglia, the heel of Italy. There, an openly gay, left liberatarian, ex-Communist, Nichi Vendola was re-elected as regional president. The Democratic Party had tried to install a much more moderate candidate with the hope of attracting Catholic votes. Vendola was supposedly unelectable. He is not even a member of hte Democratic Party and yet most of the party’s members selected him as their candidate in an open primary. He then won the elections. The whole event reminded me of the ascent of Ken Livingstone in 2000. Ken was deemed an extremist and a more moderate candidate was selected for the Mayoralty of London by the Labour Party. This backfired and Labour voters supported Ken instead.

This year, the meltdown of the Italian right has started but with successes similar to that of Vendola at the expense of the Democratic Party. In Milan, the party leadership tried to have selected a moderate and Catholic-friendly candidate, but instead its supporters in a primary opted for a member of Vendola’s movement, Giuliano Pisapia, a charismatic left-wing lawyer. He won. For the first time in more than 20 years Milan now has a left-wing Mayor. In Naples, the Catholic-friendly candidate of the Democratic Party came third in the Mayoral election. The eventual winner is a former anti-mafia magistrate aptly named Luigi de Magistris, who came from the centre-left anti-corruption party, Italy of Values and beat Berlusconi’s candidate in the run-off by an astonishing 65% to 35%.

When the conventional centre-left doesn’t convince its own supporters they go elsewhere, they can still defeat the centre-right, when the latter are corrupt, inefficient or do not answer the expectations of the electorate. This is what has happened in both Germany and Italy, and is part of a wider realignment within the European left.