The former DCs are not at a Dem congress that rewrites the values chart in a “socialist” key. And they’re about to slam the door
There is no peace in the Democratic Party. If on the one hand the left of the Democratic Party is slowly organizing itself around the name of Elly Schlein, on the other hand the Popolari fear an excessive anti-liberal turn in the party and with Pierluigi Castagnetti, one of the “founding fathers”, they threaten to leave, causing a division in the center after the many suffered on the left.
Candidate for secretariat dem Elly Schlein announced that she had asked Francesco Boccia to “join the team to coordinate the political relations of our movement”. A step that could unblock the situation within the left of the party, with prominent figures like Andrea Orlando and Gianni Cuperlo who still have not dissolved the reserve of the candidate to support. Orlando himself may soon converge with deputy dem for whom he had already praised the positions expressed on issues of work and change in the development model. “I appreciate a consonance of tones and accents with Elly Schlein, but let’s face each other on the platforms”, said Orlando after presenting Schlein’s candidacy for Monge.
A slow approach, therefore, dictated by the fact – to quote parliamentary sources – that exponents such as Orlando and Cuerlo express “a left different from that of Schlein: orthodox and of the 20th century”.
Meanwhile, the other candidate for the secretariat continues with his parliamentary campaign made of social networks and public interventions. Today Stefano Bonaccini spoke at the event for the 126th anniversary of Avanti!, after Orlando and after the secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta. To a socialist audience, the president of Emilia Romagna said that “the Democratic Party will be Labour, not Socialist”. Orlando’s position is diametrically opposed: “The recovery of a socialist identity is the obligatory path”. Two opposing points of view that feed the specter of future internal fractures. So much so that there are those who bet that after the congress an internal shock could be unleashed that could lead back to the DS-Margherita scheme.
Split winds that don’t concern just the left. Also and above all, the old guard of the Italian People’s Party led by Pierluigi Castagnetti is fibrillating, who during a meeting at the Don Sturzo Foundation made explicit all his discomfort with the attempts to change the Charter of Values and, therefore, the same «denomination» of the Democratic Party. Populares are, in fact, among the constituents of the party and any “twist” of that letter would lead them to “draw the consequences”, as they explain. In short, a departure from the party they helped found.
To probe the parliamentarians in office, the risk is concrete and independent of the name of the next secretary. And the comment of an exponent of the demographic left confirms that the risk of rupture is real, beyond the circumstantial sentences: «In the PPI there was so much faith in the Democratic Party that they never dissolved the Popular Party, in contrast to what DS and Margherita did instead”.
In order not to underestimate the signals coming from the popular Democratic Party, he is one of the main exponents of the dem executive: “What happened yesterday at Sturzo cannot go unnoticed, and pass in silence”, says the senator and head of security of the Pd, Enrico Borghi, questioned by the AGI. «It is evident that from Popolari the PD community receives a cry of alarm and a political signal at the same time, for an inclination taken that is perceived by many as a regression of identity and a denial of the facts of the original idea of the PD as a party of the synthesis of Italian reformism in all its forms”. Indeed, Borghi points out that “the very disappearance of the word ‘center-left’ as our definition of identity, and the constant call for a regeneration and declension of the left, appealing exclusively to a portion, certainly noble and authoritarian, of the cultures that gave rise to the Democratic Party is one of the traits of this season. The experience of democratic and popular Catholicism, together with all those who founded the Democratic Party, certainly cannot be placed in parentheses, and the Congress of the Democratic Party is the natural place where one can express one’s subjectivity. Returning to the center-left, the plural is capable of being strongly representative and competitive », he concludes.
Source: IL Tempo
Emma Fitzgerald is an accomplished political journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in political science and international relations, she has a deep understanding of the political landscape and the forces that shape it.
