Elly Schlein’s strabismus

There are two major paradoxes surrounding Elly Schlein’s already problematic leadership. The first is evident right from the start of his election: he finds himself leading a party whose members did not vote for him. Unthinkable in the glorious days of the PCI, where the symbolic strength of the party secretary was ensured by a full internal investiture. In fact, the bizarre procedure of the primaries allows non-members to cast their vote on the leadership of a party of which they are not members. It would be like having someone who doesn’t live there vote in a condominium assembly on whether or not to do major renovations. It is, therefore, his secretariat by proxy for an ideologically left-wing people who, however, no longer recognized themselves in the policies of the Democratic Party and who with a coup, legally entirely legitimate, overturned the decisions taken by its effective members.

The situation that Schlein therefore had to face is what in the clinical pragmatics of communication is called a “double bind”: your task is to lead a party which, however, in its full-fledged members, does not recognize itself in your leadership. Untenable position for anyone. For Bateson, to whom we owe the concept of “double bind”, it is the antechamber of psychosis.

The second paradox instead concerns a basic squint that seems to have fatally struck the new secretary. In this regard, the recent return to the Pd of the former internal frondists who then emigrated to Article 1 or scattered throughout the rarefied galaxy of the “left-left” cannot pass over in silence. This squint consists of a division that seems incurable: on the one hand, Elly Schlein generationally embodies a new wind, a promise of renewal, the fertile leap of desire, but, on the other, her political choices translate into the conservative recovery of figures and themes that belong to a pre-Renzian left which obviously identifies Renzi as an infectious disease of the party that must be eradicated even in its always possible recurrences. As if then, that is, before Renzi, the Democratic Party sailed in serene and electorally gratifying waters. A minimum of historical memory would instead signal the defeat, not electoral but political, of a candidate given as winner in the 2013 elections (Bersani) with the consequent irreversible comatose crisis of the party. Also in this case the signifier “Renzi” actually covers problems of substance that far go beyond the person of him since they concern the very identity of the Italian left. Which? Let’s fix at least one, namely the irreconcilable existence within the Democratic Party of a reformist soul and a maximalist soul. This is a profound irreconcilability, not only strictly political, but also more broadly cultural. With a further complication that objectively weakens the action of the secretary. In our time, maximalism has indeed married populism, which has found its most compact and significant political manifestation in the M5S. The expression “wide field” effectively summarizes the ideal convergence of maximalism and populism. With the difference that Conte’s action is freer because it is not weighted down by any internal counterweight (Di Maio’s melancholy exit from the scene made the movement stronger and more homogeneous). But Di Maio is not to Conte what Renzi is to Schlein. Because Renzi is not just the name of a politically defeated person, but the title of an issue whose development is very complicated. In fact, it is a question of questioning the dual soul of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party cannot be purified of reformism because this soul belongs to it. Renzi himself with the foundation of Italia viva underestimated the weight of this belonging. Many of his gods did not follow him because they rightly believe that the home of left-wing reformism in Italy continues to be that of the Democratic Party. It is the deepest meaning of Bonaccini’s candidacy for the secretariat of the party which, not surprisingly, would have won if only the members had voted. Schlein’s squint therefore denounces the impossibility of achieving a recomposition of the dual soul of the Democratic Party and, more generally, of the Italian left. It would be like trying to reassemble a couple who have made misunderstanding and perpetual quarrel their only chance of survival. It is what Vittorio Cigoli clinically defined as a “desperate bond”: “we cannot be together, but neither can we be separated! ”. Left-wing reformism should have its own home which, if it is not Schlein’s Democratic Party, cannot be Action or Italia viva either, which have shown all their limits by quickly wrecking the project of a new unitary reformist party. The desperate ties are in fact toxic ties: as long as the Gordian knot of the incompatibility between maximalism and reformism is not untied (or cut…) the Democratic Party will continue to be subordinate to the M5S on the one hand and, on the other, to be slowly eroded by what remains of the Third Pole.