Italy has proved especially vulnerable to competition from China, given that many of its artisanal trades — textiles, leather, shoemaking — have long been dominated by small, family-run operations lacking the scale to compete with factories in a nation of 1.4 billion people. Four Italian regions — Tuscany, Umbria, Marche and Emilia-Romagna — that were as late as the 1980s electing Communists, and then reliably supporting center-left candidates, have in recent years swung sharply toward the extreme right.

Many working-class people say that delineation is backward: The left had already abandoned them.

“So many Italian families are struggling,” says Federica Castricini, a 40-year-old mother of two who works at a shoemaker in Marche, and who has dumped the left for the League. “The left doesn’t even see the problems of Italian families right now.”

Despite its Marxist trappings and solidarity with the Soviet Union, the Italian Communist Party was never devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It was left wing in the same way as Nordic countries like Sweden, its leaders intent on equitably distributing the gains of economic growth.

“The left has always been able to govern during expansionary moments, during the construction of the economy after World War II,” says Nadia Urbinati, an Italian political theorist at Columbia University in New York. “They could govern by promising good salaries, a pension system and health care. When there was an expansive economy, the left was strong, because the left offers you jobs.