For the Democratic Party, more currents than ideas

In the meantime, thanks also to the scandalous affair of the so-called Qatargate, the Democratic Party is losing electorate and points in the polls. This also happens during the electoral campaign in two important regions such as Lazio and Lombardy (over fifteen million citizens). Campaign which, having also caused the primaries to be postponed to the end of February, shows a poorly prepared and very disoriented Pd. If the current picture is bleak, the future is bleak. And it is a vulnus for Italian democracy. If only because the Democratic Party was born, in the first decade of this century, from the aggregation under the same symbol of the two main political forces of the last century: Catholics and Communists. Two forces that – unlike all the others in the field – have a historically profitable militancy in the material and moral reconstruction of the country after the war. With diversity of points of view, of course, but with unity in the foundation of the Republic and in the writing of the Constitution. And with respectable ruling classes and government experience.

The problem, perhaps underestimated at the time of the merger, is that in the previous fifty years the two forces had given each other a thrashing over political-economic strategies. Did it make sense to get together? The idea was born in the mid-1990s, under the majority electoral regime, to oppose Berlusconi’s right. It was then made concrete by Romano Prodi: who – first with the Ulivo, then with the Union – managed to beat it twice (but never to govern for an entire legislature). At the time, intellectuals from the two political areas criticized the “cold fusion”, because the union was not the result of a meditated unitary and far-sighted strategic construction but of a contingent circumstance: Berlusconi, without going into subtlety, had brought together various components of the right; to counter it, it was also necessary to unite the left. A serious political perspective, on the other hand, would have required quite different philosophical-political itineraries. For example: a comparison on the conception of a new humanism in modernity and on the overall vision of Italy in the post-industrial era. All in all, as times changed, both Catholics and Communists had changed a lot: getting closer in objectives if not in lifestyle.

The Democratic Party can now recover by overcoming not so much the dialectic of internal ideas as the struggle between currents over power (and certainly four candidates in the primaries are not a great sign). It is difficult to say whether it is useful to go back to the troubled events of the DC and the PCI before the birth of the Democratic Party (for the popular left, Ortensio Zecchino did it in last Tuesday’s Foglio). But the future is crucial and there are more questions than answers about it. Three decades after the birth of the Democratic Party, does the convergence of the two opposing political cultures continue? Are the cultural conflicts of the 1900s around the “person”, “society”, “equality” really out of date? How much do the socio-cultural differences between those who come from popularism and those who come from communism weigh on the Democratic Party?

Naturally, in addition to clarifying these fundamental doubts, it is necessary to reflect, in parallel, on the great problems of the country. First: employment, work, wages, poverty. And then: institutional arrangements and bureaucracy; power; healthcare; school; university and research; justice; welfare; transport; infrastructure etc. Huge problems on which it is unthinkable to envisage solutions without a solid cultural background that suggests a vision – appreciated by the electorate – of today’s complex society.