Ilaria Salis remains in prison. The Democratic Party wants to nominate her and there are those who insist on Cecchettin –

Edoardo Romagnoli

March 29, 2024

The Budapest court has decided: Ilaria Salis will remain in prison, no house arrest. And now the Democratic Party is thinking of nominating her to get her out of there or, in the worst case scenario, to send a message. It seems like a provocation but in reality it is a solution that Schlein is generally pursuing in the lists ahead of the European Championships. The secretary has a problem: she won the primaries with the votes of non-members and without the support of most of the PD nomenclature. For this reason she found herself forming a team, to carry out her requests, without her “hers” that she had already placed in the secretariat. A clear example of this phenomenon is Paolo Ciani appointed in June 2023 to replace Piero De Luca as deputy group leader in the Chamber of the formation that brings together the Democratic Party and Democratic Italy despite him not even having a PD card. Now he’s trying once more by proposing a series of civic members, mostly women, to be placed at the top of the list. Among these the last names would be, in addition to that of Salis, the father of Giulia Cecchettin and Cecilia Strada. Not only. The leader would also have decided for herself the third place in the lists, with the exception of the islands constituency in which she would present herself as the head of the list. A strategy that was not liked within the party because it would take away safe positions from many big names.

One of these would be Pina Picierno, the vice president of the European Parliament, who due to gender alternation would risk finishing fifth behind Sandro Ruotolo in the southern constituency. The names are not yet clear, but for now in the south the pattern might be: Lucia Annunziata top of the list, Antonio Decaro second and Elly third. In the North East instead: Annalisa Corrado tops the list, Stefano Bonaccini second and Schlein third. The secretary has in mind to use the North East constituency as a “vent” for Bonaccini, along the lines of “just place you and yours here and I’ll take care of the rest”. It’s a shame that the president of the Democratic Party didn’t like second place and even threatened to withdraw his candidacy. For Bonaccini’s Alessandro Alfieri «it is strange to say the least that the president of the party ends up second on the list. With the civic leaders and the candidacy of the secretariat everywhere we risk not valorising our ruling class.” While for Debora Serracchiani “there is the issue of women who risk being penalised”.

There was also controversy over the candidature of Marco Tarquinio, former director of L’Avvenire, a convinced pacifist with ideas on the conflict in Ukraine different from those held by the Democratic Party up to now. For this reason Lorenzo Guerini, from the reformist Base who supported Bonaccini, argued: «Our line on Ukraine was and is clear. Do we perhaps want to open up on a point on which we were united during the electoral campaign?”. But he is not the only one to reject the idea of ​​nominating Tarquinio. Even Eugenio Giani, the governor of Tuscany, a constituency in which the former director should be a candidate, declared that “I believe that in this constituency there are already people capable of representing it (the territory, ed.)”. In short, Elly would like to send people to Europe who can reflect her line and to do so she would even be willing to leave some of the party’s big names at home in order to nominate “civic aligned” candidates.