To err is human, but to persevere is diabolical. Already a few weeks ago, before the Umbrian elections, the unprecedented outing of the secretary of the Democratic Party, Nicola Zingaretti, had raised a chorus of criticisms, incredibly soft towards the grillino mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, who will go down in history as the worst first citizen of the capital. Then, climbing awkwardly at straws, Zingaretti had corrected the shot by emphasizing the role of opposition of the Democratic Party to the current Capitoline administration, which will be remembered for the mountains of waste that invade the city, for public transport in disarray, for the absence of any infrastructure project, for the No to the Olympics and for the flop of the Roma stadium, as well as for the series of scandals and the endless whirlwind of councilors.
If the Pd wants to hope to take back the leadership of Rome, the least it can do is a trial without extenuating circumstances against the bad Grillina council and its mayor, which obviously does not also exclude self-criticism about the past. Instead, not only is he handing over the banner of the fight against Raggi to Matteo Salvini and the League but, with Zingaretti's former right-hand man in the Lazio Region, Massimiliano Smeriglio even goes so far as to propose a fatal embrace with the Five Stars both in the supplementary replacement of Paolo Gentiloni in the Chamber and in the next municipal elections. Which, read against the light, would mean putting the silencer on any criticism of Raggi to the infinite joy of Salvini and the entire center-right, which sees the possibility of reconquering Rome, as if Mayor Alemanno had never existed.
In fact, what does Smeriglio offer? Center-left primaries open to the Five Stars to choose the new parliamentarian but also the new mayoral candidate. Naturally Smeriglio premises that Raggi will not be able to run as a candidate, but an electoral agreement for Rome with the Five Stars is imaginable, who defend the Raggi experience to the hilt and want an encore, in which we can shoot zero on the failure of the current mayor? Obviously nobody believes it and Smeriglio's precondition (excluding Raggi's candidacy in the next municipal elections) has the value of a fig leaf. The result, in addition to the fatal embrace of the Democratic Party with the Five Stars in Rome, would be only one: to silence criticism of the Giunta Raggi and open a prairie in front of the aggressive Roman electoral campaign of Matteo Salvini and the League.
Such a suicide in the Pd house had only been seen at the time of the Bersani secretariat with that streaming meeting with the Five Star deputies which represented one of the most humiliating moments in the history of the party. If he continues on this path, Zingaretti has a good chance of doing even worse and the constant slaps that the Five Stars give him every time he talks about local alliances after the Umbrian collapse seem to be worth little for the Democratic Party. To err is human but to persevere is truly diabolical.
