Dead and cremated more than a year ago Silvio Berlusconithe “psychonano” mocked in the squares by Beppe Grillo before he discovered the vows he continued to take when deceased and held them against the no longer guaranteed Giuseppe Conte, the five-star world has adopted as its irreducible enemy Matteo Renzi. Like thirty years the communist – post-communist world, considering the changes of name and symbols of Pci after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what it had represented, he turned all his hatred against Bettino Craxi and, more generally, the socialists. Who could at most knock on the doors of the left one at a time, and even rise to some institutional or government position – from the presidency of the Council to the presidency of the Constitutional Court, both assigned to Giuliano Amato, for example – but never think of actually reconstituting their party and putting it back on the electoral market. “They must not regain the pleasure of collecting votes”, was once attributed, I don’t know frankly if rightly or wrongly, to Massimo D’Alema before Renzi proposed to scrap it.
I was struck by that liberating reminder yesterday on the front page of Il Fatto Quotidiano of an article which reported internally the exclusion, lack and so on of the symbol of Renzi’s party in next month’s regional elections in Umbria and Emilia-Romagna. Not even in Liguriawhere voting will be held in about a fortnight, Renzian influences have been notoriously accepted, we will see what effects this will have on the results of the former PD minister’s race Andrea Orlando to the presidency of the region after the judicial fall of Giovanni Toti. Who resigned himself to the plea bargain for improper corruption in order to escape the trial for non-improper corruption set up with the accelerated procedure after investigations lasting four years and conducted with the most invasive systems: from the eavesdropping Trojan to preventive detention.
Renzi is naturally, and understandably, the first to hope that Orlando’s race in Liguria will clash with the votes, however few or many, of the voters of his Italia Viva left without candidates because they were discriminated against by Conte himself with the consent of Orlando himself and, above all, of the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein. To which Goffredo Bettini, always active behind and in front of the scenes of the Nazarene, has just publicly advised understanding towards the tactical and strategic needs of the president of the 5 Stars, therefore supporting him in the actions to combat Renzi and not mistaking the latter for the personality more representative of the moderate or centrist area of the alternative alignment to the current government.
Rather than Renzi, and others Carlo Calendawho is also perhaps too polemical with Conte, we should continue or go back to betting and pressuring, according to Bettini, on Francesco Rutelli to build the central leg of an anti-Melonian table. And stop, again according to Bettini, dreaming of a separation of Forza Italia from the centre-right. Anti-Melonism, anti-Renziism, anti-Forzism, naturally anti-Salvinism and, more generally, anti-Legaism, despite the times in which a still influential Massimo D’Alema saw the League as Umberto Bossi “a rib of the left” who mistakenly fell into Silvio Berlusconi’s camp in 1994. And returned there after a break that lasted five years, despite in the meantime D’Alema himself and his successor at Palazzo Chigi, Giuliano Amato, had given the Northern League, with the reform of the fifth title of the Constitution, the expansion of regional competences.
From which the law on differentiated autonomies was derived, contested by the opposition with the referendum and with some regional appeals to the Constitutional Court. Anti, I was saying. All against, in an infinite melee in which Conte thinks he perhaps also has the physique, as well as the best cards to be the most advanced striker. Or, as the already mentioned Bettini said in 2020, “the highest point of reference for progressives in Italy”. Usually, however, the struggle in politics ends badly even when it seems to have turned out well for those who wanted it. As happened in the last century with anticraxism which ended in the electoral victory of Silvio Berlusconi, the most visible friend of the socialist leader who in the meantime retired to Hammamet to die there as an exile, or as a fugitive from his enemies.
