Thinking for the first time, as a democrat and registered, of saying goodbye to the Democratic Party

The congress of the Democratic Party worries those who love the Democratic Party. Where are vision, identity, horizon, social base and leadership? Why hasn’t those who will run as candidates been asked to draw up a government program that allows differences to emerge instead of hiding them?

For well-known reasons, post-war Italy has never had a large social democratic party. A party that expresses a convinced acceptance of the basic principles of a liberal-democratic state and in particular of the market and the freedom of enterprise, to be regulated so that the unjustified inequalities that neoliberalism causes can be corrected. And that they can be so is demonstrated by the phase of inclusive liberalism dominated by social democrats in the thirty years following the Second World War. After the demolition of the Berlin wall, the conditions seemed to have matured for the creation, also in Italy, of a party of this kind, adding together the leftist reformist-inspired political forces that remained in the field after the political crisis caused by Mani Pulite. Of all except one – and it was a deliberate exclusion – that of the Socialist Party, whose voters, activists and leaders dispersed or flowed into other parties.