And the winner is...

The results of the election held in Fidenza on Sunday were announced the next day. The tallies from the European Parliamentary elections were posted early on, and for those of us who aren't looking forward to a return to the 1930s, they were pretty discouraging. Across Italy the right-wing Lega, headed by Italy's Trumpish interior minister, Matteo Salvini, came in number 1, with 34 percent of the vote, while the center-left social-democratic Partito Democratico (PD) polled a discouraging 22 percent. Add in the other nationalist parties (Forza Italia, Fratelli d'Italia und so weiter) and the far right's share of the vote comes scarily close to 50 percent.

Here in Fidenza (as in much of northern Italy, historically the Lega's stronghold) the Lega did even better. In Fidenza it racked up 40 percent of the vote, while the PD received only 25 percent. Combining the Lega's local votes with those for Berlusconi's Forza and the Fratelli, over half of Fidenza voters chose the far right. Pretty grim.

These results were posted early on Monday by the Fidenza administration

All day yesterday we waited to hear the bad news about the mayoral election. Would the PD's Masari be turned out in favor of the Salvini-ish Scarabelli?

Late in the afternoon, the results went up on a screen set up at the front of the town hall. They were also available on the internet, but despite the rain a lot of people came by to see them in person, as it were.

Usually these town elections happen in two phases: the initial vote, and then the two most successful candidates have to go back "to the urns" (the Italian equivalent of "the ballot box," presumably because back in Roman times votes were collected in large jars) for a run-off contest. Rarely does anyone get a clear majority the first time around.

But Masari did, with a stunning 58 percent of the vote. According to La Repubblica, it was the first time in the town's history that a mayor won election on the first ballot.

In an interview with the paper, Masari noted that last year Salvini held one of his innumerable rallies in Fidenza and promised to return after the election to greet the town's new mayor--clearly hoping that the winner would be his party's man.

"I'm expecting him," Masari said. He added that since he's eager to talk to the interior minister about the national government's withdrawal of funding for one of Fidenza's schools and its new police barracks, "I'm also available to go to Rome."

That evening the sound of singing and excited chatter floated up from the street. Masari's election office is just across the way from us, and despite the lousy weather his supporters were celebrating.

I'm no Nate Silver, but it looks to me like quite a few of the same Fidentini who voted for the Lega and the other right parties also voted for Masari. Perhaps they wanted to cast a symbolic vote against immigration, against the status quo, against Europe--the European Parliament is more symbol than governing body, after all. But when it came to how their own town was being run they were apparently happy to keep the status quo in place.

The size of the right-wing vote here isn't entirely a surprise, either. I have heard complaints from several people in town that "we"--we in Fidenza, we in northern Italy--are being taken unfair advantage of by immigrants, by the crooks and layabouts in southern Italy, by the European Union bureaucracy. The tone is similar to the grousing about "welfare queens" and "illegals" that we in the United States heard during the Reagan-Clinton years. It hasn't yet blossomed into the venomous hatefulness we're experiencing now in the Trump era, at least not among the people I've encountered (and have been able to understand--this is a ridiculously small sample). But unless something changes, it seems all too possible it will.