Who knows if he had had some premonitory sign or if he had realized his difficulties but it certainly suggests what Pierluigi Bersani said some time ago when he confessed to knowing very well that the activity of a politician can also end in personal disappointment. Now that moment has arrived, but the disappointment is not only Bersani's but the entire Democratic Party. Bersani is a respectable and good-natured person like almost all Emilians and was successfully governor of Emilia and then minister of industry. But as secretary of the Democratic Party he never got it right, not even by mistake and he laid bare all his limitations as a leader, the total absence of vision and charisma and an unexpected psychological weakness revealed by his subjection to Vendola and the young Turks and the ill-concealed hostility towards D'Alema who had launched him into the national limelight in recent years. If he had been a football coach, Pierluigi Bersani would have already been kicked out a long time ago by popular acclaim. His resignation is an act of dignity even if it comes late and when the damage has already been done.
Since the day he took over the reins of his party, Bersani has made one blunder after another, disavowing – this is the most incredible political and psychological aspect – his authentically reformist origins and getting lost on the banks of an ill-thought-out and incoherent leftism. He was convinced that he could win the elections at the end of February hands down and he found himself in hand with a victory mutilated by Grillo's exploits and Berlusconi's comeback. Is it the fault of an evanescent and contradictory electoral campaign? Yes, but not only. Mainly to blame for a fatal error of presumption and short-sighted cunning that led him to speculate on the Porcellum, hoping to profit from its advantages rather than fight to cancel it when – last summer – the disorientation of Silvio Berlusconi and the Pdl would have suggested a forcing reformer.
Bersani's other mistakes, all fatal, came after closed polls. First he humiliated himself by chasing Beppe Grillo and receiving only slaps and slaps in return. But, even in the face of the evident impossibility of forging a government alliance with the 5 Star Movement, Bersani has always refused to come to terms with the innkeeper and to acknowledge that a third of Italians voted Grillo but another third – like it or not – chose Berlusconi.
Having received Grillo's refusal for the government, parliamentary mathematics only allowed for another political majority: the one based on the Pd-Pdl alliance. But Bersani continued to bury his head in the sand and behave as if he had won the elections with 51%, dreaming of an impossible government of change that the post-election political balance could not even remotely imagine. It may also annoy you to govern with Brunetta and Gasparri but if you don't have another majority in your pocket you must remember that politics is the art of the possible and you must make a virtue of necessity. Now you can only create a government that reforms Porcellum and brings us back to elections. And that's that. But not Bersani. So: no open alliance with the PDL but the frantic search for votes in Parliament to put together a small government sunk by the obvious objections of a sensible person like Napolitano.
After this no small series of injuries and political blunders, Bersani, pushed by the circumstances, decided to turn the table in the battle of the Quirinale. After yet another U-turn, he had started by choosing the policy of broad agreements – the only possible one given Grillo's unreliability – but he chose the wrong candidate as Franco Marini failed to garner the consent of the entire Democratic Party. Then - to top it off on unreliability and ambivalence - he reversed course again by focusing on a personality of the caliber of Romano Prodi but making two other fatal mistakes: unjustifiably breaking with Berlusconi without the launch Prodi onto the track without securing Grillo's prior support.
Now we are at Caporetto or 8 September of the Pd, depending on historiographical tastes. But if before the election Bersani's most serious blunder was the preservation of Porcellum and, after the vote, the illusion of having won the election big time, what was the mistake that generated Marini's double flop? and Prodi in the first votes for the Quirinale? The tragic exchange of factors and that is having put the choice of candidates before the choice of political strategies, as if they were interchangeable. Since it was and is completely clear – even if Bersani has once again stubbornly wanted to deny the evidence – that the choice of the new Head of State influences the future balance of government, before thinking about the candidacies of Marini and Prodi, it would have been logical to answer the following simple question: for the Quirinale and for the Government, broader agreements with the PDL and Monti are better, or an imbalance to the left towards an improbable agreement with Grillo? The only thing that cannot be done is to pretend that the candidates for the Presidency of the Republic may be completely divorced from or even contradictory to the political strategy that must support them. Failure to understand this elementary truth is at the root of the latest disaster.
Faced with his resignation, Bersani deserves military honors, but it's too easy to blame the snipers of the Democratic Party: sorry to say, but the mistakes were all his. And it is right that they pay.
