Pd on trial in the Center, fears the Renzi-Tajani axis. “It can threaten Schlein” –

Look Brunello

September 01, 2024

They were called variable majorities, but it was another era. The one in which the “divo Giulio” had to keep the exuberance of his ally Bettino Craxi at bay. Then the famous theory of the two ovens was born, where the Christian Democrats could turn to buy bread, socialist or communist. The ambition of the seven-time Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, continues to cyclically cross the Italian political news. More recently, in some way, Pierferdinando Casini, during the Berlusconi government, also tried to rebuild a political force of the center capable of reconquering the political chessboard and leaning now on the People of Freedom and now on the Democratic Party. Even more recently, a project cultivated by Matteo Renzi, perhaps the political figure who uses the term center the most. The then former mayor of Florence, who had only been in Palazzo Chigi for a few days, in 2014, invited his arch enemy, Silvio Berlusconi, to the Nazareno. A meeting that went down in history as the Nazarene pact. In practice, the then Prime Minister and the leader of Forza Italia signed a pact for the rules: they would have to agree on the electoral law and the constitutional reform. An agreement that foundered on the election of the President of the Republic, namely Sergio Mattarella.

The Florentine, however, tried again with a close dialogue with Denis Verdini, who broke with the founder of Mediaset, and built an autonomous parliamentary group that facilitated the Renzi government in the narrowest passages. The idea of ​​the two was in some way particularly clear: to build a moderate front for reforms, which could withstand the shock wave of the M5S and the internal opponents of the project, which also failed, with the burning defeat in the referendum and with the subsequent defeat of the PD at the polls, in 2018. An obsession that however remained in the head of the former scrapper: in some way both the electoral alliance with Carlo Calenda in ’22, and the subsequent path towards the European elections (shortly before the agreement with Emma Bonino, a maxi poster with Renzi’s face and the writing il centro appeared in many advertising spaces) had this ambition. Then, as is the news of these days, the sudden turn to the left and the new love for Elly Schlein.

Yet even this time the attempt to re-establish a sort of heir to the crossed shield, or in any case, a median political force, which shuns the extremism of the right and left, has not disappeared from the scene. To follow its tracks, we must change sides, look towards Forza Italia. The summer positioning of the Azzurri has repeatedly tried to distinguish itself from the League, just think of the controversy over the ius scholae. Then, of course, the declarations of the Berlusconi brothers have had a lot of space, which some have read as a clear break from the right’s programs. At the same time, the usual Renzi, lets the imagination of the Pd minority fly, which can go back to imagining the overthrow of the hierarchies and the “retirement” of the Swiss “tsarina”. Even in politics, sometimes, one plus one makes two: what if a Pd that has returned to being moderate and pro-government met halfway with a renewed Forza Italia of Antonio Tajani? The goal would be to cut the extremes: League and M5S. A dream at the end of August, but in the country where parallel majorities were born, who knows?