Italy’s election and the war against corruption

candidates do not come to the hustings with greater credibility than Federico Cafiero de Raho. Until earlier this year the 69-year-old Neapolitan was Italy’s chief anti-mafia prosecutor. Yet Mr Cafiero de Raho is not running in the general election on September 25th for either of the hard-right parties that look set for government—the Brothers of Italy and the Northern League, whose leaders stridently, and daily, inveigh against criminality, but relentlessly link it to immigration. He is standing for the idiosyncratic Five Star Movement (5), heading its list of candidates for the Chamber of Deputies in two regions: Emilia-Romagna and Calabria, homeland of the ’Ndrangheta, the most globally pervasive of Italy’s four main organised-crime syndicates. (Italian law lets candidates stand in more than one constituency.) Another prominent former anti-mafia prosecutor, Roberto Scarpinato, is on the 5slate for the Senate in Calabria and Sicily, birthplace of Cosa Nostra.