“There is one more mystery to unravel, within this hasty and confused crisis, and it is the irresistible charm that Giuseppe Conte exerts on the heirs of the "Company", that entity which Pierluigi Bersani used to refer to indicate the hard core of the former PCI leadership which, in addition to him, included and includes Massimo D'Alema, Achille Occhetto, Goffredo Bettini, Nicola Zingaretti, Andrea Orlando and many others". This is what "La Repubblica" wrote yesterday, but in reality there is no mystery in the political positioning of the ex-Pci firm and "Il Foglio" is right, which also yesterday opened with a title that could not have been more eloquent than that : “The Firm for Conte: Bersani, D'Alema and Occhetto seek revenge against Renzi and foment comrade Giuseppi (Conte). Disappointment in sight".
There is nothing strange in what is happening: it is the hatred against Matteo Renzi, who at the time scrapped it without much compliments, that animates the company's spirit of revenge of the Bersanis and D'Alemas, but also of the Bettinis and Orlandos. And who knows if the ambiguity on Washington facts di Conte, who has never called Donald Trump into question, will make them blush. It would be more complex to analyze the anti-Renzism of Nicola Zingaretti, who seems to be the result of an evident inferiority complex towards his predecessor, and of Dario Franceschini, whose moves have for some time been solely oriented towards the conquest of the Quirinale and therefore towards the need to support Conte and above all the Five Stars, whose votes will count in the election of the next President of the Republic.
But the clash between Renzi and the company cannot be classified only as a clash of personalities and a desire for revenge: instead it is the expression ofeternal conflict that once divided socialists and communists and in more recent times continues to tear the left apart between innovators and conservatives, among those who think that the interpretation of a changing world requires a new political culture and who clings to continuity with the past. Renzi does not come from the communist tradition, he is politically different from the former PCI and, beyond his often unbearably rough character, he has precisely this original sin, which the company will never forgive him.
Making quite a few mistakes in his effervescent political experience, Renzi is simply someone who – as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Emmanuel Macron did with mixed results – wondered, in his small way, why the left is a social minority and politics and what it should have done to modernize itself and to guide the transformations of a country like Italy. The unfortunate defeat of the constitutional referendum and the subsequent political events crippled him and he did his best to complicate his life, but the problem of how to modernize Italy and how to modernize the entire reformist line-up remains and only those who hide their heads in the sand can pretend not to see it. But it will not be the leftist conservatism that thrives in the Firm that will give an answer to these questions.
Everything else and what is happening these days comes as a consequence, such as the support of the company for a premier like Conte who had the ease to lead a sovereign government with Lega and Cinque Stelle and a pro-European government with Pd, IV without any embarrassment , Leu and Cinque Stelle, who are not even now distancing themselves from Donald Trump but who above all demonstrate that they are unable to bring the country out of the swamp of immobilism despite the tragedy of the pandemic and the historic occasion of the Recovery Plan.
However, the real mystery is not the seduction that Conte exerts on the former PCI company and on the radical chic coryphaeus of the many talk shows, but how it is possible to exchange causes and effects and not understand that Renzi's restlessness is only the effect and not the cause of the political crisis, the root of which is evidently in the immobilism and in the complete absence of vision and reforming power of the Conte 2 government and of the prime minister who directs it. If we do not start from here and we are not alarmed by a country that risks sinking due to the ineptitude of a large part of its ruling class, we will not understand anything of the current political situation and we only run the risk of giving an interpretation caricature them. It is sad to see that the heirs of a party, the PCI, which was born on 21 January 100 years ago and which represented misery and splendour in Italian history but was an undoubted bulwark of democracy, struggle so much to understand it to the point of going in tow of the lawyer, happened by chance on the chair of Palazzo Chigi.
