Italy’s general election promises victory for the right-wing alliance — thanks in part to an electoral system that everyone criticizes but no one has sought to change. The current law gives a huge advantage to parties who run in coalitions, who can win a large majority of seats even on well under 50 percent of the vote. Ahead of the September 25 election, the right-wing parties have overcome their divisions to make such an alliance: Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia will stand united, whereas their center-left rivals will not. Polls suggest that for the first time the election’s main winner will be the most radical right-wing force in Parliament: Meloni’s party, the heir to postwar neofascism.

One of the causes of this likely outcome is the dismal situation of what New Left Review founder Perry Anderson called Italy’s “invertebrate left.” This is the land of Antonio Gramsci and Enrico Berlinguer, and until 1991 it had the strongest communist party in the West. Yet Italy’s left-wing parties have now been undergoing a deep crisis for over a decade.

Today the largest party that mainstream media call “left-wing” is the Partito Democratico (PD) — though many would dispute that it belongs to the Left. This party was born from a bizarre union, in 2008, of former Communists and former Christian Democrats, for half a century after 1945 the largest party of government. In a few years, former Christian Democrats took over the PD, first with Matteo Renzi and then with Enrico Letta, resulting in policies that often hurt the working class (for instance raising the retirement age and getting rid of workers’ protections against firing). Today workers and the inhabitants of poorer neighborhoods vote more often for right-wing parties than for the PD, whose voters are more likely to be found among the highly educated and wealthy.