Catholic, communist, gay

Meet the new star of Italy's left, Nichi Vendola, who, unlikely as it seems with this profile, is poised to capitalise on the country's increasing disgust at the outrageous antics of its once untouchable prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, writes Chase Madar

Silvio Berlusconi's gift for the battuta - wisecrack - has been a great help to his political career. But there are limits. He tried to bounce back from the revelation that he intervened to secure the release from prison of a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer, "Ruby Heartstealer," who had been at his private parties, by saying "it's better to go crazy over beautiful girls than be gay".

This did not go over well and in no way blocked public disgust with Berlusconi's "bunga-bunga" lifestyle. Bunga-bunga refers to an orgy involving a powerful leader, to which the Italian prime minister was allegedly introduced by his friend, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The crack about homosexuality was aimed at the Italian left's new star, Nichi Vendola.

Vendola is the governor of Apulia, heel of the peninsular boot, one of Italy's poorest and most socially conservative regions. That it should elect (and re-elect) a governor with a background in the Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation party), which he helped found in 1991, but is also openly gay, is counter intuitive, even if Vendola is a professed Catholic. He is now one of Italy's most popular politicians and may lead a coalition of left and centre-left parties in the national elections of 2013. He is a charismatic scrapper, and has the Italian right worried.

Vendola can use the battuta, too. In November he enraged the right-wing governor of prosperous northern Lombardy by declaring it the most "mobbed-up" region in Italy. The Camorra, with its base in the south, has managed to penetrate northern Italy, but still, having a southerner criticising the north is a novelty. And reversing decades of anti-communist Stalin-baiting, Vendola has condemned Berlusconi for embracing Vladimir Putin and the "business is business" approach to buying energy from authoritarian states like Russia and Libya.

When asked if he might become the first gay prime minister, Vendola said there had already been one, whose identity he had sworn never to reveal.

He is also unusual in that he easily quotes the 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, and the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as the New Testament and his former bishop, Don Tonino Bello, who is in the process of being beatified.

A poll last November found Vendola was the best-liked politician in Italy, more popular than either leader of the largest centre-left parties.

After his failed attempt to lead the Communist Refoundation party, Vendola formed a new party, Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (Left Ecology Freedom), of which he was unanimously voted president at its founding in October 2009, offering him a secure if relatively small national power base. His Fabbriche di Nichi (Nichi's Workshops) are political and social clubs, primarily for the young, that began in Apulia but are now to be found all over Italy. They are dedicated to decentralised, "horizontal relationships" of power, and to doing public good deeds. Vendola has more Facebook fans than any other politician in Europe, and he podcasts, blogs and tweets.

However, for now Vendola is governor of Apulia (population four million). He was first elected in 2005: after a narrow victory in the broad leftwing coalition's primaries - new in Italian politics - and then gained an even narrower victory against the conservative incumbent. "The centre-left didn't want me to run: they said the left would never win with me on the ticket. Well, the left never won in Apulia anyway - until me. Which shows all along the problem was not in the demand for good politics, but in the supply." In March he was re-elected by comfortable margins.

Vendola has made novel reforms. Apulia has invested heavily in renewable energy sources and now supplies Italy with 13% of its solar energy and 24% of its wind power. Land and properties confiscated from the Sacra Corona Unita - Apulia's organised crime syndicate - are no longer put up to police auction, where the mob used to buy them back, but turned into co-operative farms and youth and cultural centres. Tourism is increasing.

The Italian south is also a public health disaster zone, with some of the highest cancer rates in western Europe. Apulia's change to cleaner fuel sources, and a provincial 2008 regulation limiting dioxin emissions from the steel plant in Taranto, have been welcomed by environmentalists and political leaders. But the planned opening of two new waste incinerators has disillusioned some of his fans. Vendola claims he lacks the power to block the construction of incinerators.

Organised crime remains a serious problem. Vendola, as a southern Italian and former vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies' anti-Mafia commission, urges that all law enforcement efforts be complemented by social programmes targeting those who might otherwise enter organised crime at its lowest levels.

His prescription is not a flaky one: as has been documented by ethnographers and sociologists, the roots of Italy's Mafia culture run deep in social and family life. Loosening organised crime's hold on Italy will require not only good police work, but social transformation as well.

Vendola's rise has not been without friction. He has fallen out with comedian and anti-politician Beppe Grillo, and has been accused by Marco Travaglio, Italy's leading investigative journalist, of being "a red Berlusconi" for denouncing some anti-Mafia inquiries that targeted some of his circle.

Now Vendola is an international figure supported by Italians living abroad, for whom six seats are reserved in the Senate and 12 in the Chamber of Deputies. On a visit to the US in November, Vendola met John Kerry, now head of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, with the assurance that he didn't want Italy to pull out of Afghanistan, just out of the war in Afghanistan. Vendola said Italy wished to refocus on humanitarian work and peace negotiations. At first glance this would appear to be a coherent policy, but in fact it was humanitarian non-governmental organisations that clamoured the loudest for troop escalation. Vendola's position is not a departure from that of his previous party, as the Rifondazione Comunista acquiesced to Italian military participation in the occupation of Afghanistan.

The Italian media call him l'Obama italiano - a politician whose candidacy has gone from impossible to compelling. Vendola's childhood home, like so many others across Italy both Catholic and communist, had portraits on the wall of Pope John XXIII and Yuri Gagarin. Nichi, born in 1958, joined the communist youth group at 15 and treasures the memories of its consciousness-raising activities.

After school he would read L'Unità, the daily paper of Italy's venerable communist party (PCI - disbanded in 1991) to illiterate labourers. "They loved hearing about South America ... When I started travelling down there, I had read so much about all the places and their struggles it was like I had been there before. Today if you ask a 20-year-old in Italy where Chile is, he won't have any idea."

Vendola comes from a tradition where Italy's mass left was the largest and most vital in Europe, building up important civic associations: women's groups, youth organisations and farmers' associations, among others.

But political parties failed to keep pace with the popular unrest and collective actions that lasted from 1967 to the last great Fiat strikes of 1980.

When Vendola speaks of the past 20 years as lost decades, he is referring to the extinction of a vibrant and politically sophisticated civic culture which brought millions of people into the orbit of leftwing politics. Today, much of Italy's elite dreams of a stable, narrow, two-party political system, each party hewing close to a centre. Vendola, however, seems more committed to stirring up mass participation in politics than in "normalising" the system. - ©2011 Le Monde diplomatique

• Madar is a civil rights lawyer based in New York