By Guy Dinmore in Rome

Rome’s election last week of its first rightwing mayor since the time of Benito Mussolini has been celebrated by fascists as a historic victory over the left.

Packs of young, thuggish supporters of Gianni Alemanno greeted the new mayor’s appearance at the Campidoglio city hall with straight-armed “Roman” salutes, shouting abuse at communists and immigrants.

“Before, if you were a fascist you had to pretend to be part of the mainstream to have respectability. Now they are coming out of the closet,” said an aide to the defeated centre-left candidate, Francesco Rutelli.

Debate over the significance of the National Alliance’s first election victory in a major city has been intense – especially among the capital’s small but important Jewish commun­ity, which is widely thought to have swung in Mr Alemanno’s favour. Rome’s Jewish voters, numbering about 9,000, explain their shift to the right in various ways, most often because they see the National Alliance as firmly pro-Israel.

Michel Bokhobza, whose family fled from Libya to Rome in 1967 in the wake of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day war, says Italy’s centre-right is much closer to Israel than the pro-Arab bias of the centre-left.

“Even if his past was very close to fascism and ex-fascism, Alemanno belongs to the coalition guided by [Silvio] Berlusconi and [Gianfranco] Fini,” he said, referring to the People of Liberty alliance that also swept national elections last month.

Mr Bokhobza had always voted for centre-left candidates for Rome mayor. Giving his second reason for changing, he said they had not managed the city well. “The ideology of politics is finished,” he added.

Sandro Di Castro, president of the Jewish community’s Bene Berith association, says the present sense of danger posed to Israel by Islamists and Iran outweighs memories of the more distant and tragic past of the mass deportations from Rome by the Nazis and Mussolini’s anti-Jewish race laws.

Times had changed, he said, since 1993 and the first open elections for Rome. The right’s candidate then was Mr Fini, now leader of the National Alliance, who at that point was part of its neo-fascist predecessor, the MSI, the direct heirs of Mussolini.

“Fini was then seen as a demon and neo-fascist,” said Mr Di Castro. The “turning point” came in 1995 when Mr Fini became head of the new National Alliance and started to steer it towards the mainstream. That process was completed in 2003 when, as deputy prime minister in the second Berlusconi government, Mr Fini denounced fascism as an “absolute evil” in a ground-breaking visit to Israel.

Mr Alemanno’s personal journey is less certain. Leftwing commentators have called the 50-year-old former agriculture minister fascist, neo-fascist and post-fascist – in the 1980s he headed the sometimes violent youth wing of the MSI in Rome.

But, campaigning on a law-and-order platform, he was also astute in courting the Jewish vote, promising to continue school visits to Auschwitz and to complete work on a Holocaust museum in Rome.

Dominique Sicouri, from Egypt’s Jewish community, says her “heart is with the left” but she still decided to work with Mr Alemanno in building ties with France’s ruling UMP party, for which she acts as spokeswoman in Italy. She sees Mr Alemanno as intelligent, serious and a pragmatic moderniser. His Jewish supporters say that in power he will be better placed to rein in extremism. If he fails, they will be among the first to desert him.