The actress mother, the birth in Sicily and the pain of the party for Malcolm Occhetto- Corriere.it

ROME – “I went from all to nothing in a matter of hours. To describe my story, I use the image of a blast furnace that goes to full capacity and then, suddenly, is turned off ». Every time since his resignation in June 1994 to the present day they have asked Achille Occhetto about his departure from the PCI-PDS, from the party that for him had been home, family and community, from that “thing” that he had radically changed to Bolognina by making that word disappear from the identity card – “communist” – here, every time the secretary of the “turning point” has always used that image. The blast furnace that “goes to full capacity and then, suddenly, is turned off”. Not the oven, you turn it back on and heat it up. But the blast furnace, which, as years of news from Ilva have taught, once turned off certainly does not turn on again at the push of a button. From everything to nothing, which then something will never return but nothing remains. And it must certainly be due to the power of the image, in addition to its being profoundly true and sincere with respect to Occhetto’s stay in the world of the former Communists who put him aside and then removed him, if now so many of his old men ” comrades “remember her in the moment of pain, all that becomes nothing without actually having the possibility of returning something.

The moment in which Achille Occhetto mourns the sudden death of his eldest son Malcolm, announced yesterday with a post on Facebook, which was born from the marriage with the Italian-Somali actress Elisa Kadigia Bove. Only the intertwining of politics that becomes a party and the party that becomes a family can explain certain mechanisms that are now decidedly out of time, just as the parties themselves seem to be out of time. As with the children of all PCI leaders, Malcolm was a child of the PCI.

He was born in Sicily, in fact, where Occhetto – Turin by birth and training, then very young provincial secretary of Milan, then national manager of Botteghe Oscure – was sent in the late 1960s to try to counter the rise of Salvo Lima’s DC. and Vito Ciancimino, in the tragic years of the “sack of Palermo”. Secretary of the federation of the capital, then regional secretary. This is how it worked at the time: the best were sent away from home, where they were needed. And their home – and that of their families, the birthplaces of the children, the children themselves – became where the party had determined it to be. Achille Occhetto then climbed that party.

On the death of Enrico Berlinguer in 1984, two names circulated for the succession: his and that of Luciano Lama. Alessandro Natta will be chosen as secretary. But four years later, when Natta ends up in hospital due to an illness, in the garage of Botteghe Oscure – just before the 8pm news – Occhetto signs with his ally of the moment (who would become his internal enemy later) Massimo D’Alema a pact that he would hold the party in the years to come. A sort of relay: today Occhetto, who goes to lead the PCI; tomorrow D’Alema, who falls back to the leadership of the Unit first and to the leadership of the parliamentary group in the years to come.

Meanwhile, it is the party that has changed. Also thanks to an intuition of Occhetto. Three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the new secretary – celebrating the 45th anniversary of the battle of Porta delle Lame in Bolognina – announces the turning point. It is November 12, 1989. A year and three months later, in Rimini, the twentieth and last congress of the PCI opens, which becomes Democratic Party of the Left. There, in that moment, rise and fall, altar and dust, merge for Occhetto into a single thing. The “turning point” is approved but for the election of Occhetto, crushed by internal snipers, there are no numbers. His last election will be formalized in Rome, far from the historical impact and the limelight of the Rimini meeting.

The rest is history: the break with D’Alema and a piece of the leadership team, the brown dress of the TV confrontation with Berlusconi, the defeat in the political elections of March ’94 and the drop of the European elections three months later, which broke the camel’s back . “Akel,” as his father called him, leaves the group and his photo ideally disappears from every pantheon. When in ’96 the Olive tree wins the elections and when in ’98 D’Alema becomes the first ex-communist to lead the country from Palazzo Chigi, he is in the rear, following a left-wing current that will then lead him to the birth of a “List Di Pietro-Occhetto” which will be the embryo of the personal party of only Di Pietro, the Italy of values. In the moment of pain for the disappearance of his son Malcolm, today, the whole old guard of the “party” is returning to gather discreetly around Occhetto, the secretary of the “turning point”. That flame of almost thirty years ago has come back to light again. The family that returns to the party, the party that returns to the family. And the nothing that returns everything, with that blast furnace that still heats up. Even if to the naked eye it seems, and irremediably, extinguished forever.