Opinion

The Democratic Party (PD) seeks to regain its identity and also its electoral space

photo_camera Matteo Renzi

While Mario Draghi continues with the management of the government that was entrusted to him two months ago, the Democratic Party (PD) is trying to recover its lost identity after the real fiasco of Nicola Zingaretti's two years (2019-21) at the head of this party. In this two-year period, the Roman politician has not been able to recover the significant number of votes lost in the general elections of March 2018, which cost Matteo Renzi his resignation as secretary general after a short-lived second term (May 2017-March 2018). In relation to this, Zingaretti not only failed to regain the electoral support lost two years earlier, but even had to witness a new split, that of former minister Calenda, who decided to leave to found Azione in the autumn of 2019 and is managing to gain a foothold in a voting intention of around 3.5%.

Zingaretti and his right-hand man (Goffredo Bettini) decided to bet heavily on supporting Conte, who was not from their party, as president of the Council of Ministers, against a Renzi who was willing to support even an alternative name from the ranks of the PD in order to get rid of Conte, with whom he had been openly at loggerheads for months. In the end, as is well known, Conte had no choice but to resign after failing in his attempt to "tarmac" Renzi (whose parliamentary group in the Senate, decisive for the continuity of the government, remained at all times compact around the leader of Italia Viva) and shortly afterwards it was Zingaretti who left through the back door of the PD, a party specialised in liquidating its general secretaries like a veritable shredder (Veltroni, Franceschini, Bersani, Epifani, Renzi twice, Zingaretti... and all this in a party that is a party that is not only a political party but also a political one. ... and all this in a party founded in October 2007).

The party, faced with Zingaretti's unappealable decision to leave (although attempts to get him to change his mind were rather limited because the party leadership was the first to know that with Zingaretti they were not going to get out of the derisory figures on which the party had been operating for years), then decided to turn to former prime minister Letta, who had been retired from politics for years. They did not have many others to turn to: of the presidents of the Council of Ministers that the PD has had, there is one (Romano Prodi) who is already at an advanced age (he has just turned 82), another who is now focused on his work as commissioner for economic affairs (Paolo Gentiloni) and a third (Renzi) who is not even in the party, from which he left in September 2019.

Letta has had to urgently accept being "regent" of the party because with the very wrong tactics of Zingaretti and Bettini (and a few others who are in the leadership), what the PD had done was to revive the still very battered Five Star Movement, which still has no leading cadres and instead is deeply divided, but which at the moment has a strong leader in the person of former Prime Minister Conte. 

The Tuscan politician (Letta is, like Renzi, from Tuscany, but not from Florence, but from Pisa) considers, in relation to this, that it is one thing to make joint candidacies with Five Star and quite another to become a "subordinate" party. Because, although Five Star has a leader that the PD does not have at the moment, the reality is that, of the five regions where the centre-right does not govern, it is the PD that does so (we are referring to Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Lazio, Campania and Puglia). And while the Five Star Movement is about to lose its main stronghold (the city of Rome, in the hands of the lawyer Virginia Raggi since June 2016), the PD has practically assured the re-election of Giuseppe Sala as mayor of the capital of Lombardy, the city which, after all, is the economic engine of the country.

Giuseppe Conte

So Letta has begun to change the party in the run-up to the general elections, which, although they are expected to be less and less close (vaccination is running extremely late and the implementation of European funds is only just beginning), will not take longer than two years, which is when the five-year period established by the Italian Constitution expires. Thus, the first visible change has been to appoint a new spokesperson in the lower house, Deborah Serrachiani, who has replaced the veteran ex-minister Graziano Delrio. Letta knows that, after Zingaretti decided that the three PD ministers who should be in the Draghi government would all be men, the party's female sector, which is also quite important, is in full rebellion with the party leadership.

But perhaps the most difficult issue he will have to face will be the matter of the party's nominations for the municipal elections, which should be held in May-June this year but are likely to take place in September-October. The three most important cities in the country are in the running: Milan, in the northernmost part; Rome, in the central part; and Naples, in the southernmost part. And in relation to this, the most difficult thing is to combine Cinque Stelle, on the one hand, and Renzi's Italia Viva, on the other, in the same candidacy. 

We should bear in mind that only this week Matteo Renzi decided to go to the PD headquarters to meet his former party colleague Letta. In a meeting that the PD described as "frank" and "cordial" (and which Renzi himself has confirmed took place in this way), the leader of Italia Viva offered Letta the possibility of joint candidacies, but on the condition that the Cinque Stelle, whose dislike of Renzi is mutual, and even more so after he brought down the second Conte government, would not be included. Thus, Letta knows that, although Renzi's party has very low voter intention figures, municipal politics is a different world, and there Renzi has more strength than one might think: to give an example, his candidate in Sassari (Sardinia's second city) won more than 20% of the vote last September. As far as Rome is concerned, Renzi has a very clear candidate to support: former minister Calenda, who was part of his and Gentiloni's government. Meanwhile, the Five Star candidate (the aforementioned Raggi) has no chance of revalidating her mandate, and Rome, in addition to being the country's capital, is a city that in recent times has been governed by the centre-left (Veltroni and Marino are two good examples of this) but where the centre-right, led by the Roman Meloni, now has a good chance of winning.

We will see what happens in relation to all these candidacies, but what is certain is that the PD has to recover its lost position because Five Star has now become a direct competitor for control of the centre-left space. And all this without forgetting that the party's leadership, before anointing Conte as leader of a possible coalition formed by PD, Cinque Stelle and LeU, will demand a primary from which the head of the ticket must emerge. This was the case with Veltroni for the 2008 general election, with Bersani for the 2013 general election, and with Renzi for the 2018 general election. And here the PD leadership will want to fight Conte's candidacy. 

Proof of this is that, after former minister Pier Carlo Padoan gave up his seat as MP for Siena, the secretary general of the Tuscan PD (Simona Bonafe) flatly refused to cede it to Conte, recalling that the list should run and be occupied by another PD member, since that seat had been won by the Democratic Party in March 2018 and not by Cinque Stelle, the party to which Conte belongs. We will see what the outcome of the reorganisation of a party that has gone through no more than three splits (LeU, Italia Viva and Azione) in less than five years and which must now try to regain some of the electoral space it has lost.

Pablo Martín de Santa Olalla Saludes is a professor at the Centro Universitario ESERP and author of the book 'Italia, 2013-2018. From chaos to hope' (Liber Factory, 2018).