The article aims at studying the reasons for the new way of looking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by the Italian political world: the mutual recognition of Israel and the Vatican, the visit to Jerusalem by the leader of the formerly fascist party, Mr. Gianfranco Fini, and the beginnings of a movement of interest towards the Jewish State also within the political left. From a historical viewpoint, anti-Semitism in Italy found its origins in the Church's attitude toward the ‘deicide people’. Beginning with WWI, to this position was added the worry that the Holy Places might fall under Jewish control. From those times dates the Holy See's evermore manifest liking for the Arab populations of Palestine. Nowadays the line of conduct of the Church has as its basic objective the defense of Christian minorities in the Middle East, and for this reason it maintains dialogues with all actors in the region. The weight of the Church influenced also the attitude of the Italian State, even though from its inception the latter had to make adjustments because of other international requirements. This multiple subordination caused the different republican governments to always keep an official equidistant stance among the conflicting parties in the Near East. Behind this apparent neutrality, however, the feelings of benevolence for the Arab countries and the Palestinians have gradually intensified. Italian leaders have been trying to conduct a Mediterranean policy on the borders of the Western alliance, and their feelings have been oriented in consequence. During the 1970s, the governments went as far as to conclude a secret pact with Palestinian terrorists, to avoid terror acts on the Peninsula in exchange for some freedom of action. And in the mid-eighties the Craxi government did not hesitate to challenge the US in order to guarantee the continuity of that line of conduct. On that occasion Craxi, speaking in Parliament, compared Arafat to Mazzini. The end of the Yalta-established order has modified the traditional data of Italian foreign policy. However, the increased attention paid to Israel has also other causes: the changed attitude of the Church after the civil war and the Syrian occupation in Lebanon, events which both caused difficulties for the consistent Christian minorities; the hope that the Oslo process could reward the Italian ‘clear-sightedness’; last, but not least, the quarrelsome internal politics that make the Palestine conflict a mirror of the Roman conflicts. Lastly, the article connects the recent goodwill for Israel with the threats of Islamic terrorism in Italy. A political opinion trend would revisit the Middle Eastern conflict as the upturned perspective of a ‘clash of civilizations’ already existent nowadays. And a possible act of terrorism in Italy might give to this opinion a mass basis.

A central debate in political science centres on the origins of political parties and specifically on the question as to whether they emerged as a result of the rise of parliamentary institutions. Regarding the Italian party system, the commonly held view is that Italian parties emerged as a consequence of national unification and the establishment of parliament. This article contributes to the debate on the origins of Italian parties by presenting empirical evidence on the timing of their initial formation, analysing data regarding the social base, membership, organisational articulation and policy-making accomplishments of the two major political movements active before and after the establishment of the national parliament. The article argues that, at least in the Italian case, parties did not originate in the legislature; rather, similar to countries such as Germany and Spain, Italian parties developed as a result of a major national crisis.

In recent years two populist regionalist parties have emerged in the alpine region, the Lega dei Ticinesi (LDT) in Switzerland and the Lega Nord (LN) in Italy. However, while typical populist themes such as the constant attacks against professional politicians and appeals to the ‘people’ resonate in the rhetoric of both movements, what differentiates them is the style of their propaganda, as the LDT's paper, Il Mattino della Domenica, constantly strives to shock its readers in ways that are alien to the Italian leghisti. Following a discussion of the strength, organisation and rhetoric of the two parties, this articles addresses the reasons why they have adopted different strategies of communication by considering the parties’ constituencies, the nature of their media and the personalities of their leaders.

With the removal of Khrushchev in 1964 the Soviet Union adopted—at the level of the secret service—a more aggressive policy towards western countries, with a more intensive recourse to so-called ‘covert operations’. These operations regarded even western communist parties, such as the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which were close to being viewed as ‘orthodox’ by the Soviet leadership. The so-called ‘active measures’ which resulted were realised through the infiltration of agents, the training of (usually young) extremists, and (through them) the sending of warnings to the PCI leadership about its divergence from the Soviet line. This context helps us to understand better than before three key events of the years 1968–1973: the emergence of the first terrorist groups in Italy (the Partisans Action Groups and the Red Brigades); the bombing of the electric mains line where Giangiacomo Feltrinelli lost his life; and the car crash in which Enrico Berlinguer was involved in 1973 during an official visit to Bulgaria. An analysis of the Cold War context in which Italian terrorism (and specifically the Red Brigades) developed reveals origins and patterns that are different to those usually identified in the literature.

The general election of April 2006 marked a further milestone, and possibly a turning point, in the recent trajectory of Italian politics. Unexpectedly narrow, the election outcome brought to government a coalition which, in the immediate aftermath of the campaign, appeared to face one of two possibilities: that either it would find the very precariousness of its position to be, paradoxically, its strength, giving it a degree of cohesion it might otherwise not have had, or that it would succumb to opposition attempts to exploit the divisions in its ranks and therefore fail to last for any length of time. Early indications pointed in both directions. In the second place, if the immediate consequence of the outcome appeared to be a strengthening of the position of Berlusconi (since he had been expected to lose by a wide margin and had instead apparently staged a dramatic comeback) then the 2006 defeat appeared to create the need for a redefinition of the Casa delle libertà, with a reduction in the role of Berlusconi himself and a new prime-ministerial candidate. Third, in bringing about the second alternation in government since the party-system upheavals of the early 1990s, the outcome appeared to represent the consolidation of a bi-polar party system based on fragmented coalitions. However, precisely because of the system's fragmentation and the seeming precariousness of the in-coming government's position, there appeared to be room for considerable doubt about the likely direction of future party-system developments. In short, if the election appeared to represent the confirmation of past trends, in other respects it looked as though it might also represent the start of a new period of uncertainty in Italian politics.

In the last two decades, the extreme right has experienced a dramatic rise in electoral support in many West European democracies, achieving more parliamentary and even governmental power. Despite extensive interest in this phenomenon and a myriad of academic publications about it, both in sociology and political science, little consensus has been reached about the reasons for the observed growth of right-wing extremism. Three books; The Extreme Right in Western Europe by Elisabeth Carter, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe by Piero Ignazi and Radical Right by Pippa Norris, try to overcome this lack of consensus through up-to-date analyses of the current situation of extreme right-wing parties in Western Europe and (in Norris’ case) even beyond. All three authors try to go beyond the existing analyses which mainly concentrate on socio-demographic characteristics of extreme right voters. However, they focus on partly different research questions and, consequently, are based on slightly different research designs.