19/02/2014
Jorge del Palacio Martín. University Rey Juan Carlos
The way Matteo Renzi’s name has burst onto the Italian political scene has created a certain degree of confusion in both the national and international public opinion about him and his project. Until a few months ago, Matteo Renzi was just the young mayor of Florence who competed for the General Secretariat of the Partito Democratico with Pier Luigi Bersani at the end of 2012, and was heavily defeated. However, the tempo of Italian politics has finally allowed he who was just a young mayor and who had dared to challenge Bersani for the Partito Democratico leadership to become the brand new PD Secretary-General one year later. Moreover, he will be appointed as Prime Minister of the Italian Republic in the coming days, if nothing comes in between.
The fact that Renzi is insultingly young—he is just 39 years old— and that his political experience is confined to his native Tuscany has generated an understandable lack of knowledge about him, where both excessive praise and unwarranted criticism have found place. Said lack of knowledge about him has generated comparisons between him and other personalities such as Obama, Berlusconi and Machiavelli; depending on the way he is regarded: whether as a modern politician, a populist apprentice or a Florentine conspirator. But it has also generated amusing situations, such as those involving the parish priest of the village where he was brought up, Rignano sull’Arno, talking about when he was an altar boy; or those provided by his schoolmates relating anecdotes of his childhood; or that of his mother telling La Stampa: “Matteo? L’Ho affidatto alla Madonna” (“Matteo? I’ve entrusted him to the Virgin”).
In his short time as head of the Partito Democratico he has sold an idea of “new and young” politics—whatever that means—and exploited an image of energetic and determined politician, which is the logical extension of said idea of politics. Two facets designed to work in Italian politics, which, apart from its many virtues, seems to be excessively corporate and resistant to change, close to “leopardism”. Two facets which also fit with the personalistic approach successfully brought by Silvio Berlusconi to Italian politics after the disintegration of the party system which was born out of the post-war. For the moment, his arrival in national politics has been useful to unblock the reform of the electoral law, to promote a constitutional reform which readjusts the relationship between the State and the regions in favour of the first one and to get rid of an importat figure, no less than Prime Minister Enrico Letta. Enrico Letta, who threatened to hinder Renzi’s reform agenda from his own party, already knows what “Renzi’s decisionism” is.
Among the many interesting aspects of Renzi’s arrival in the Italian political scene, the challenge which his politics present to the left warrants special attention. Renzi has never hidden his admiration for Tony Blair and the way he dismantled the British Labour Party and its dependence on trade unions in order to translate it into the principles of New Labour. The Partito Democratico is a young party, founded in 2007, where former members of the Christian Democrats—such as Renzi—do their best to coexist with former Socialists and Communists. The leader of the PD is for the first time a politician whose origins do not come from the PCI party and its powerful union CGIL, which is not a minor detail. If Renzi manages to bring about an ideological renewal of the Partito Democratico which will mitigate the differences between families, he will put an end to the difficult journey of the Italian left in the search of a new identity, begun by Enrico Berlinguer and Bettino Craxi in the late 1970s. However, it will not be an easy task, considering that the natural inclination of the Italian left toward factionalism since the disappearance of the PSI and PCI parties in the early 1990s works against said endeavour.
Whether he follows Blair’s lead or that of himself, Renzi’s success in regenerating the Italian left and adjusting it to a modern project which is able to work outside the control of its former Communist and trade union groups, would be good not only for the PD but also for the Italian democracy. Even better now that it is in office, since another failure of the PD party would be directly capitalized by populist options embodied by Grillo and Berlusconi. To that end, Renzi will have to prevent the historical disagreements within the Italian left from being reflected in the Government institutions. As shown by the Letta affair, this will not be an easy task.