The going gets tough and the very tense meeting of the Pd's management marks a turning point, if not exactly a point of no return. There are three novelties that have emerged and only a small part concern the highly predictable preliminary dispute between the secretary-premier and the dem minority, which yesterday reached grotesque levels, but instead affect the scenario of the constitutional referendum, the fate of the Italicum and the perspectives not only of Matteo Renzi and his government but of the current legislature.
Of course, the threat of the Pd minority to blatantly contradict itself by voting No in the referendum after approving the reform in Parliament is probably globally unique, but moreover, the fact that the party that today expresses the head of the Italian government has always been unique within it an internal opposition which has become the prime minister's fiercest adversary and which reserves increasingly hostile criticisms of Renzi which it has never done even to the right-wing governments of Silvio Berlusconi. On the other hand, former prime minister Massimo D'Alema, who yesterday somehow inaugurated the intransigent turn of the dem minority, publicly theorized that Renzi's constitutional reform is worse than the one imagined by Berlusconi at the time, D'Alema himself sunk.
But the key point of the clash between Renzi and the minority of the Democratic Party concerns the post-referendum scenario with some significant changes. If the Yes' wins, Italy's stability will be strengthened, Renzi's premiership will be consolidated, the new congress of the Democratic Party will start and perhaps the revision of the reform of the Italicum will begin - as suggested by Minister Franceschini, on whose role -Renzi or more likely post-Renzi different schools of thought are already confronting each other - and the legislature can continue until its natural end or almost. Just the pronouncement of Franceschini, who said he was in favor of the introduction of the vote and the coalition bonus rather than the vote and the list bonus, is certainly the second most important novelty, after the waltzing rounds of the dem minority. An ambivalent move and not without ambiguity that of the minister on whose true nature the future will tell.
However, the most relevant of the political innovations that emerged from the tug-of-war in the Democratic Party leadership is another and it is Renzi's indication, while respecting the prerogatives of the Head of State, of the ineluctability of the dissolution of Parliament and recourse to elections brought forward in the event that the Yes vote loses the referendum. The premier's signal is clear: if I lose, I can't stay in Palazzo Chigi but consistency and respect for the popular vote require me to leave and the government can only fall with me. But yesterday Renzi took a step further and sent out another signal - and herein lies the biggest news - when he made it clear that, together with his resignation and that of his government, there would inevitably be early elections because he would go into crisis also the Parliament. It is a signal addressed to the internal minority who dreams of a government of national unity without Renzi to prepare the elections only after having passed a new electoral law and a new constitutional reform, in the illusion that it will be child's play to untangle such knots in a few months complex, and which thinks, despite all the disappointments suffered so far, to involve for the first time the reluctant grillini in government and reform action. To err is human, but to persevere is diabolical.
In short, after me the deluge and after me the early elections, not even so covertly sends Renzi to say, because the Renzians, who today are the great majority of the party, would not betray their leader and would not give the go-ahead to a government without Renzi, before a new congress. But in the event of Renzi's defeat in the referendum, could the Franceschini variable be triggered? Anything can happen and in politics twists and turns are always the order of the day, but it would be difficult even for the manoeuvrable Minister of Cultural Heritage to think of the Presidency of the Council on the ashes not only of Renzism but also of the Democratic Party and without reckoning with the vertical fall of Italy's reforming credibility and with the sword of Damocles of the financial markets.
In reality, in an interconnected world like ours, it would not be the new sorcerers' apprentices of Italian politics who would decide a hypothetical post-Renzi post-Renzi election but simply the markets, as Silvio Berlusconi well recalls when he thinks of the summer of 2011. Is it the dictatorship of the markets? No, it's the democracy of the markets, darling, which is always better than the country plots of the old politics.
