CGIL, Camusso ponders coup pro Landini

With her continuous populist or corporative slippages and with her prejudicially adverse moves to the reformist left, Susanna Camusso will go down in the history of the union as the worst general secretary of the CGIL, an organization which has in its pantheon characters of the caliber of Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Luciano Lama and Bruno Trentin who are probably turning in their graves seeing the disaster that has engulfed their parent company.

Camusso, who came from the socialist ranks and who perhaps paid for her endemic weakness for this too, was the first female secretary of the CGIL but in fact she proved to be a great disappointment, as evidenced by the continuous decline in membership among active workers , the permanent divisions with the other union organizations and above all the conspicuous loss of influence that the union - and the CGIL in primis - registers both in the workplace and in society. The fault of a weak, culturally inconsistent leadership, perpetually hovering between corporatism and populism and never taking sides on the front of reforms.

At the next CGIL congress, which will be held in Bari in February, Camusso, who is aiming for an international trade union post, will leave the scene but, according to what is reported by a very well-informed site such as "Il diario del lavoro" directed by Massimo Mascini, the secretary the general would be meditating a real coup to influence the battle for his succession. For months Camusso nurtured the hope of leaving the baton to another woman, Serena Sorrentino, current general secretary of the CGIL civil servants, but this candidacy never really took off. In the running for the general secretariat of the CGIL there are therefore two candidates left, who represent two different souls of the current confederal secretariat: the reformist Vincenzo Colla, former secretary of the powerful CGIL of Emilia-Romagna, and the movementist Maurizio Landini, former leader of the Fiom-Cgil is always ready to chirp with the confused area of ​​left-wing extremism and above all with the Five Stars.

The choice of the future secretary of the CGIL belongs, by statute, to the new general assembly that will come out of the next CGIL congress, but, according to the indiscretions collected by "Il diario del lavoro", Camusso is thinking of heavily intervening in the congressional games with a preventive pronouncement in favor of Landini's candidacy. It would be an unprecedented and highly unfair fact with respect to the free choice of members and militants of the CGIL which would have the effect of influencing the Bari congress and laying the foundations for bringing the CGIL ever closer to the populism of the Five Stars - a which Landini looks to – to the detriment of a union line of autonomy from political games and from the Government represented by Colla and by the territorial and category organizations that support him. But it would also be the inevitable conclusion of a ruinous trade union leadership that has led the CGIL into a tunnel from which it will be difficult to get out anyway.