From Veltroni’s warning to Letta’s bitterness, the “daily guerilla” of the Pd secretaries

ROME. Perhaps one day some former secretary of the Democratic Party will recount his days in the trenches of Largo del Nazareno in detail, reveal unpublished background stories, clearly explain who and how made his experience a “daily guerilla”, to put it in the words of Nicola Zingaretti at the time of farewell. And then we will finally understand better why every abandonment of the leadership of that party – nine between secretaries and regents in fifteen and a half years – is a mesto cahier de doléances, never a joy, a rosary of allusions to internal battles and continuous clashes.

The latest to denounce “bitterness” and “ingenerosity”, last Saturday in front of the party’s National Assembly, was Enrico Letta. “But I keep them to myself,” he added: it doesn’t need to say who they came from; it’s a matter of currents, one time it’s one, another time it’s the other. Two years ago they had recalled him from Paris where he was happily a professor: unanimously crowned, the party was in pieces and needed someone to glue the pieces together, even quickly. Two years later, he complains of a daily life in which the secretary spends “the whole day adjusting internal balances”; just the evening remains to explain the line to the voters, «with the residual energies». He had no more energy, in February 2009, the founder Walter Veltroni, the acclaimed first secretary of the nascent Pd, elected by primaries attended by three and a half million people. A people’s movement never repeated in these proportions, but not enough to preserve the secretary: “Do not do to my successor what has been done to me”, he chanted in a crowded, bitter resignation speech just a year and a half after the ‘election. Years and leaders go by, but evidently the ancient vice of war between currents does not find a respite, if in 2019 Nicola Zingaretti throws in the towel with a flamboyant post on Facebook: «I am ashamed that in the Democratic Party, the party of which I am secretary, twenty days we only talk about armchairs and primaries ».

Perhaps even sharper words than those used a few years earlier by Pier Luigi Bersani, who also had some reason to be furious: all the wounds of the party were there, lined up in that failed vote on Romano Prodi as president of the Republic, 101 traitors (probably more) who had applauded the proposal the night before, to stab candidate and secretary the next day in the secrecy of the ballot box .

Each time, the outgoing leader preaches solidarity and participation of all in the common project. Each time, contrite reassurances arrive from the rest of the party. And every time it is enough to put a new secretary on the saddle to restart the carousel. It may be a coincidence but it is striking that of the nine leaders who have followed one another, two have abandoned politics, the other two have founded another party. In a month, the primaries will decide who among Stefano Bonaccini, Elly Schlein, Gianni Cuperlo and Paola De Micheli will occupy the room on the third floor of Largo del Nazareno. The four contenders know what awaits them, it is no coincidence that the common refrain is to involve everyone, but to change the ruling class. Shared decisions but with new people. Hoping to avoid the eternal target practice.