Four more days of electoral campaign and then, next Sunday, it will be time for ballots. The parties are starting with a certain tiredness to an appointment characterized more than by the traditional duels between mayoral candidates of opposite alignments (centre-left against centre-right) by significant absences, which concern the Lega and the Pdl, and the substantial weakening of the third centrist pole. All while the attention of public opinion (but it also applies to the parties) looks more at the consequences of the French vote (victory of the socialist Hollande) in the presidential elections, and that of the Germans in the Rhineland (defeat of the CDU). Yet next Sunday's vote comes less than a year before the expiry of the Legislature and the next political elections. An appointment implicitly remembered by the President of the Republic with his pressing, yet disregarded, appeals to implement the new electoral law quickly.
For now, the parties on this front are clearly late and one gets the impression that the electoral earthquake of ten days ago (it is not an everyday thing to see the PDL and the Lega suddenly reduced to a minimum) served to create new difficult to make a decent law that gives citizens the right to choose their own representatives. It seems that everything has come back into discussion, including the so-called Violante draft: on the one hand there are the doubts of the PDL and the resistance within it, on the other there is the Pd which, faced with these, is tempted, probably rightly, to bring the system back into play with the double college shift. And so there is the substantial risk that in a year we will go back to voting for the third time with the Porcellum. Which would sanction yet another bad impression for the parties.
Troubled times also for the Monti government. In fact, up to what point can the PDL, under the pressure of strong internal divisions, maintain its support for that policy of sacrifices and recovery and consequent relaunch of the economy, to build which the so-called government of technicians has been put in place? Not to mention that the PDL has already distanced itself several times between the hypotheses put forward by the Government both on the subject of justice and on what concerns Rai and its surroundings? And to what extent can the Pd, with a clear advantage in view of the next electoral deadline, fail to react to the interdiction games of the former majority that supported the Berlusconi government? As for the League, the movement is now in a clear crisis, even if finally, the unlikely re-nomination of Umberto Bossi to lead it seems to have waned: for which Maroni is now the only candidate.
It is an extremely uncertain political picture that presents itself one year before the next political elections. And the anti-politics movements, such as that of the so-called grillini, certainly do not help the country to find stability and unity. However, movements that had a clear and significant success in the first round of administrative elections and that the parties would be wrong to exploit or underestimate. Sectors of the PDL and even of the center are once again tempted by exploitation. It is significant that in Parma, where a grillino will contest the mayoral seat for the candidate of the Democratic Party, there is a strong temptation in the centre-right to support him. After all, it is the right-wing revival of Togliatti's old policy of "the worse the better".
In turn, also the Democratic Party which is facing the ballots without its traditional opponents, but in direct competition with candidates who could have a left-wing profile: in addition to the Parma grillino there is Orlando (IDV), clearly favored in Palermo. These are critical issues that signal the difficulty of a party which, while aspiring to lead the country, has the necessary dialogue with those who could and should be at its side in credible political alliances.
Conclusion: next Sunday's ballots will probably have an obvious outcome (it is difficult to predict revenge for those who won't even be competing), but the way in which they are reached confirms all the current criticalities of our political system. At least electoral reform is needed. But to do so, more politics and stronger parties would be needed.
