Schlein takes the PD secretariat to Ventotene. “Us against the Europe of Meloni’s nations”

From Riano to Ventotene. From Giacomo Matteotti to Altiero Spinelli. Wreaths of flowers and secretary. Party meetings with accompanying funeral homage to build an ideal pantheon. It is a format that will not be easy to replicate but which Schlein is undertaking for the second time. Give party leadership meetings a meaning beyond that of the organization, a symbolic meaning for identify and do so in opposition to the opponent, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. For the first meeting of his secretariat, last April 21, Schlein had called everyone to a recreational club in Riano, a town of ten thousand inhabitants on the outskirts of Rome known for being the place where the lifeless body of Giacomo Matteotti was found in 1924. Before the meeting he had placed a wreath at the monument along the Via Flaminia which commemorates the socialist deputy. It was just a few days away 25 April and gathering there meant testify to be heirs of the greatest symbol of anti-fascism compared to a government led by a party still struggling to celebrate liberation as a national holiday.

Today, however, Schlein took his people by hydrofoil to Ventotene to celebrate Altiero Spinellianti-fascist in confinement on the island where, with Ernesto Rossi, he wrote the ideal manifesto of European federalism. Before the secretariat at the cemetery he paid homage to his grave and that of another of the first group of federalists of Ventotene, Luciano Bolis. A way to oppose Meloni again, this time not tacitly fascist, but anti-European, or rather a supporter of the Europe of nations. “For me – Schlein said as he arrived – it was important to come here to continue the federalist dream”. The opposite, according to the dem secretary, of what Meloni wants: “A Europe not of peoples but of national vetoes like his friends Hungarians and Poles who refuse to welcome Italy and Meloni agrees with them: here is the nationalist paradox, but we will not allow anyone to renege on the promise that the Ventotene manifesto made us “. The secretary then attacked also on the Pnrr: “Meloni risks making us lose a unique and unrepeatable opportunity”.

On the island of Lazio, Schlein has also inaugurated a club of the Democratic Party inside the library Last chance named after Ursula Hirschmann, wife of the anti-fascist Eugenio Colorni in confinement in Ventotene with Spinelli (whom she married secondly after Colorni’s death) and Ernesto Rossi. It was thanks to her, who was not subject to restrictive measures, that the Manifesto was able to spread in the big Italian cities. Today’s homage, Schlein pointed out, was not only to Spinelli, but also to her, as well as to Bolis, Colorni and “to that first group of federalists who were the first to imagine that dream of the united states of ‘Europe”.