David Broder is a historian and translator. His books include First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy (Verso Books, 2020) and the forthcoming Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism In Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, 2023).

His writing on Italy has appeared in the New York Times, Internazionale and the New Statesman, and he is Europe editor at Jacobin magazine.

“There’s been a collapse in left wing working class electoral turnout. We no longer have the mass parties of the past. So instead you just get this polarization between right wing populist forces or even ones with the fascist past. And then the only alternative is the sort of technocratic pro-European liberal center.”