Barring unforeseen madness that political desperation can sometimes cause, it is very unlikely that the electoral collapse suffered in Umbria from the impromptu alliance between the Five Stars and the Democratic Party leads to the crisis of the Conte 2 government. But this does not mean that it will have no political effect, even if among the defeated there are those who try to console themselves by remembering that the inhabitants of Umbria are equal to those of a small city like Lecce or a Roman district. The size of the population is not everything and it also happens in the United States that the vote of the small state of Ohio is what makes the difference and which can determine the election of the American President.
However, there are two or three points that after the Umbrian vote deserve to be focused. The first is that it will not be the result of the Umbrian regional elections that will put the Pd-Cinque Stelle axis in crisis but exactly the opposite namely that the disappointing outcome of the vote is not the cause but the effect of the weakness and inconsistency of the hasty alliance between the party of Nicola Zingaretti and that of Luigi Di Maio.
If the government alliance between Cinque Stelle and Pd, propitiated this summer by Matteo Renzi and Beppe Grillo and then adopted without too much conviction by Zingaretti and Di Maio, has its own logic and the very clear objective of not handing over the Italy to the sovereignty of Matteo Salvini and not to take the country out of Europe through early elections, the idea of extending an emergency alliance to the regional level and to transform it from a tactic and contingent into a structural one even imagining a common home, as the minister dem Dario Franceschini is repeating, is nothing short of a gamble. And the proof is in the total absence of a common vision, of a common project, of a common political culture at the basis of a hypothetical stable and structural alliance which today does not have a soul and which, precisely for this reason, cannot arouse passion and consensus. But which, on the contrary, closely resembles a pure power accord.
If there is one lesson that the Umbrian vote should suggest to those who have lost, it is not that of screwing up the legislature and crushing a government that has only two months to live in the bud, but that of do not cradle illusory and hasty designs that arise in the Democratic Party and in the Five Stars only from the fear of Matteo Salvini and Matteo Renzi and from the hope of giving life, through a cold fusion of the two parties, to a bipolarity that appears very uncertain at present. And it is a pity that even an innovative but a little too narcissistic politician like the former minister Carlo Calenda is unable to grasp the differences between an emergency alliance and a structural alliance.
It would perhaps be wiser to acknowledge that politics, like nature, cannot make leaps and that the most that this political phase can guarantee is an emergency and transitional government that avoids new traumas for the country, does no harm to citizens and give the political forces the necessary time to think about what will come after the election of the new President of the Republic. Too little? No, rather a manifestation of realism, in the awareness that running too much without having enough breath and without having clear ideas can only cause confusion and disappointment. As the Umbrian vote punctually recalls.
