Three clues are not proof but make you think. After the unpredictable government agreement, Will Pd and Cinque Stelle end up building a common house? In the sense of a common list in the next general elections and not only at regionals or even in the sense of a merger between the two parties? It is a theme that would have seemed unlikely to say the least a few months ago, but which has been shaking the political palaces for a few weeks now. For now I'm alone hypotheses, whispers, fears and hopes but the birth of the Conte 2 government, Matteo Renzi's divorce from the Democratic Party, the fears of the Five Stars and above all of the Democratic Party for the imminent regional vote, the decline of Luigi Di Maio's leadership within his Movement itself, the evanescence of the Zingaretti secretariat in the Democratic Party and, last but not least, the games already underway for the not very distant election of the next President of the Republic are all elements that fuel the most daring suggestions.
After all, it is the leaders' own words that trace, with their allusions, new scenarios, unthinkable until recently.
FIRST CLUE
Let's start from the bottom. What did Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ever want to say in the conclusion of his interview with Corriere della Sera last Saturday? The prime minister thus replied to a question about Umbria as a laboratory of the M5S and Pd alliance: “It is a bit of an exaggeration to talk about laboratories. There is a political project that needs to be built. We are still at the beginning”. In short, we are at the beginning but the unity project exists: it is the premier who says it and it is the same political figure, who suddenly appeared on the national scene last year, who today does not hide his aims much on the Quirinale or, alternatively, to become the guide of the embrace between Pd and Cinque Stelle in a new edition of Italian bipolarity. Pay attention: many criticisms rain down from Conte, some even broken down, against Renzi with whom relations are icy, but never any against the Democratic Party, yet his government is standing with the votes - decisive - of both one and the other party .
SECOND CLUE
Even more explicit than the premier is the head of the Pd delegation in the Conte 2 government, the minister of cultural heritage, Dario Franceschini, forerunner of the embrace with the Five Stars who, on the occasion of a recent rally in Cortona, during the regional electoral campaign in support of the Pd-M5S candidate, Vincenzo Bianconi, he said verbatim to his comrades and Grillini allies: "We must build the common house with the weapons with which we fought until yesterday". Clear? If the words have a meaning, the "common house" between the Democratic Party and the Five Stars is not a simple alliance, but it is much more and can go, in due time and electoral law permitting, to the point of a merger between the two political forces today partners of Government.
THIRD CLUE
The Five Stars had also been in government with the League but then an alliance, including an electoral one, had never been hypothesized, which instead is happening with the Democratic Party in Umbria and perhaps later also in the other regions in which they will vote. Compared to the simple government alliance, it is an indisputable step forward that seems to lead to a much more demanding embrace between the two political forces - Five Star and Pd - and that is to say to the electoral alliance on a national scale and then perhaps to the merger.
Will it really come to the wedding? The litmus test will be the next electoral law that the Democratic Party has requested to balance the cut in parliamentarians wanted by the Five Stars and to correct the consequent distortions in terms of territorial representation. If the new law is even more proportional, as the grillini are asking today, it will not be an incentive for the Pd-Cinque Stelle merger but if, on the contrary, the drive towards union, political and electoral, between the M5S and the Pd will return to the majority irresistible, even if the risk of putting Matteo Salvini back on track would be very strong.
But, in the case of an ever closer embrace, who will lead the games? The Democratic Party or the Five Stars? The political scientist Angelo Panebianco does not have many doubts and writes in Corriere: “Today it is not so obvious that the Democratic Party can engulf the Five Stars (or that he can, at least, recover the votes given to the grillini). It is possible that the opposite occurs, i.e. that it is the Democratic Party that is engulfed" because, "despite all their fragility, the Five Stars have a strong identity" while "the Democratic Party, from an identity point of view, is neither flesh nor nor fish". Only that a grillina hegemony over the common house with the Democratic Party would take place under the banner of populism. Left-wing populism, but populism nonetheless.
