Rosa Luxembourg, the Polish-German socialist famously theorised ‘you lose, you lose, you lose, you win’, and that will be of a certain consolation to Walter Veltroni, the first leader of the new left-wing party Partito Democratico, particularly given the shock news last night that the party’s ‘sure-fire’ Mayoral candidate for Rome, Francesco Rutelli, has been surprisingly beaten by right-wing PdL candidate Gianni Alemanno.

Of course, Luxembourg didn’t get to taste victory herself (and it’s easy to argue that her brand of revolutionary socialism is still waiting), as she wound up shot and her body dumped in Berlin’s Landwehr canal. It’s not, thankfully, a fate facing Veltroni, or his failed PD candidate Rutelli, but the first right-wing victory in Rome in over 14 years should have some political fallout.

Rutelli, former leader of the former Margharita (daisy) party – which has now merged with the former DS to make up Veltroni’s ‘new’ party – became the darling of the left when he defeated heavyweight post-fascist Gianfranco Fini for the job of Mayor of Rome back in 1994. Since then his major achievements have been to lose in a head-to-head with Berlusconi in 2001’s general election, and to have been one of the leading figures in Prodi’s lacklustre coalition that failed to win a signifacnt majority against Berlusconi in 2006, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the outgoing government.

He’s also managed to get himself involved in a farcical relaunch of Italy on the global tourist market, costing millions and yielding precious few results – apart from the chuckles provided by an ill-advised ad where Rutelli pleaded, borat-style, with english speaking tourists to ‘veeseet my cantry’.

In short, his last major political success was over a decade ago, and yet Veltroni’s PD’s saw him as a safe-bet for the hugely important Rome position. Alemanno’s victory puts the final jack-booted stamp onto the prevailing notion that Italy has swung to the right. If anything, though, it’s veered sharply away from a dangerously incompetent left-wing leadership.

There are various factors in Rutelli’s defeat, including a highly probable abstention by serious left-wing voters still enraged by Veltroni’s decision to campaign against his former left-wing coalition partners the Sinistra Arcobaleno (Greens and Comunists allied) – a decision which led to the decimation of the latter at the polls, while not preventing a Berlusconi victory. Add to that various convenient security scare stories (there were a number of hugely-reported rapes in Rome over the last ten days), which will always be to the right’s advantage, and the going was always going to be tough for Rutelli.

It’s hard, though, to disagree with journalist Peter Gomez’s assesment that this is the best thing that could happen to the left in Italy at this moment. The vote, at the end of the day, can only be read one way: a high profile candidate hand-picked by the PD’s failed to convince, despite having all the advantage. Romans didn’t vote for Rutelli because they didn’t like him as a candidate, plain and simple – a theory backed up by the fact that in the provincial elections the PD candidate Zingaretti won comfortably.

Now is the time for the various high-profile lefties like Rutelli, who have more than a decade’s worth of a dismal record, to quietly depart the scene. A new party isn’t worth a thing without new ideas and, crucially, new faces.