by Phil Stewart

ROME, May 5 (REUTERS) — The death on Mon­day of a man attacked by neo-Nazis threw the spot­light on polit­i­cal mil­i­tancy in Italy, prompt­ing the oppo­si­tion to ask if a right-wing sweep at an April elec­tion had fed a cli­mate of intolerance.

The vic­tim, 29-year-old Nicola Tom­ma­soli, finally suc­cumbed to his injuries and died on Mon­day after being beaten into coma on May 1 by a group of youths iden­ti­fied by police as neo-Nazi soc­cer hooligans.

The beat­ing, in the north­ern city of Verona, was con­demned across the polit­i­cal spec­trum; police have so far ruled out any polit­i­cal motive for what appears to be an iso­lated act of violence.

Still, Italy’s centre-left por­trayed it as a sign a grow­ing intol­er­ance in a coun­try where fears about crime — par­tic­u­larly by immi­grants — con­tributed to their resound­ing defeat by the right in last month’s national and munic­i­pal elections.

The inci­dent has put right-wingers on the defen­sive over the sug­ges­tion that sup­port by mil­i­tants helped them to win the April elec­tions, includ­ing the may­or­ship of Rome.

“The respon­si­bil­ity lies with right-wing pop­ulists,” said Paolo Fer­rero, a left­ist min­is­ter in the care­taker gov­ern­ment expected to step down later this week.

He accused the far right of cre­at­ing “scape­goats” for Italy’s social prob­lems that “brings in votes in a cli­mate of inse­cu­rity, but also sows a long trail of hate”.

The defeated centre-left can­di­date for prime min­is­ter, Wal­ter Vel­troni, said: “We are faced with a neo-fascist-style aggres­sion that can­not and should not be underestimated”.

In an infor­mal poll by one tele­vi­sion sta­tion, 51 per­cent of respon­dents said they feared the Verona attack could her­ald the start of a new wave of vio­lent intolerance.

CITY OF LOVE?
The mayor of Verona, from the anti-immigrant North­ern League which backed Sil­vio Berlus­coni as pre­mier, rejected any link between his party and Tommasoli’s assailants. “There are mil­lions of peo­ple that voted for us. It could be that one of them is a crim­i­nal,” Tosi, who is crack­ing down on ille­gal immi­grants in Verona, a city made famous by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”.

But Tosi is not the only right-wing politi­cian who had to dis­tance him­self from far-right elements.

Rome’s new Mayor Gianni Ale­manno urged sup­port­ers to avoid “excesses” after a small group gave him the right-armed Roman salute asso­ci­ated with fas­cist dic­ta­tor Ben­ito Mus­solini and chanted “Duce!” (leader), as Mussolini’s fol­low­ers called him.

Ale­manno, whose National Alliance is the suc­ces­sor to the post-war neo-fascists but is try­ing to become a main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive party, com­plained that the left tried to depict him as a fas­cist and anti-Semite dur­ing the campaign.

“We must con­demn any form of ide­o­log­i­cal extrem­ism regard­less of where it comes from,” said Ale­manno as he vis­ited mon­u­ments in Rome to Jew­ish vic­tims of Nazi occu­pa­tion, Ital­ian wartime resis­tance heroes and Rome’s synagogue.

“There are extrem­ist fringes on the far right as well as the far left, but they are more an expres­sion of urban mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion than actual politics.”

Dur­ing the may­oral race, Ale­manno came under attack for wear­ing a Celtic cross round his neck — a sym­bol of the far right in Italy com­pa­ra­ble to the Nazi swastika.