Pd primaries, the Renzi factor fills the challenge for the secretariat (1,800 days later) – Corriere.it

Elly Schlein remembers one word, “rubble.” For Pier Luigi Bersani is an adverb, “contemptuously”. Gianni Cuperlo, in the interview entrusted to Aldo Cazzullo for the Courier, cited it five times, more than Giorgia Meloni (two) and above all more than the entire sum of citations dedicated to the other three challengers for the secretariat. And not a day goes by that the past season is not the subject of declarations to the agencies, posts on social networks, public positions taken, reflections from behind the scenes or club debates such as those underway within the party, which will accompany the carriage up to the election of a new leader.

Today I am exactly one thousand eight hundred days. One thousand eight hundred days have passed since the afternoon in which Matteo Renzi announced his farewell to the secretariat of the Democratic Party, which was later formalized and resulted some time later in the foundation of another party. So much water has passed under the bridge since that March 5, 2018the date on which the former prime minister took the floor to announce the start of operations «a serious and decisive congress».

And now — where now means a period that concludes a five-year phaseafter a real congress, three secretaries, one of whom came out of the primaries (Nicola Zingaretti), a regent (Maurice Martina), a fully empowered successor (Enrico Letta), not to mention the unspecified number of deputy secretaries and presidents of the Assembly -, now all that remains is the eternal return of the samethe needle that insists on an enchanted 33rpm, the bitter cup that fights anything but the incessant wear and tear of modern life in the Democratic Party, all centered around Renzi, with the only yielding to the breaking of the monotony that materializes when the subject (Renzi, in fact) becomes phenomenon (Renzismo), in a variation on the theme that everything changes except the melody of the song.

“Keep me out of these things”, replies the person concerned every time his parents send him the latest agency dispatch on the internal debate of the Democratic Party which contains his name. Only twice, in recent times, has he made an exception to the rule he imposed on himself, that of silence: when, quoting Shakira dumped by her boyfriend Piqué, he said that the Democratic Party left Ferrari (him) for a Twingo; and when he distanced himself from Bonaccini for the fleeting appearance of the former grillino Dino Giarrusso at the Milanese convention of the governor of Emilia-Romagna, with that membership announcement that later became a dead letter.

Busted every arithmetic jackpot on the days that serve to forget a person (the thousand days of you and me of the poignant ballad by Claudio Baglioni, the hundred nights that the young Totò of New Paradise Cinema di Tornatore spent in the cold and frost under the balcony of his beloved girl), even after eighteen hundred days, within the perimeter of his former party Renzi remains a guest of the stone more difficult even to scratch. Able, without lifting a finger, to create short circuits like that of last week, when the candidate accused by his rivals of pro-Renzism (Bonaccini) announced his desire to return to article 18 and was simultaneously targeted by Renzi himself and by the more orthodox anti-Renzi supporters.

Renzi yes / Renzi no, after all, it seems like a Sanremo refrain; like Italy which at the end of the last century, on the Ariston stage, Elio and Le Storie Tese cataloged under the heading «land of persimmons». And while in the Democratic Party they evoke him as a kind of specter from a horror film, he, Renzi, flaunts the confidence of someone who, deep down, doesn’t mind that we still talk about him. Because after all, in politics as in life, good or bad as long as we talk about it. Even if fashions change, time passes. And even if the days since the farewell to the secretariat, tomorrow, will already be one thousand eight hundred and one.