Italy's political scene is being shaken by a local administrator who is counting on his youth and a centrist message to challenge the older generation within his Democratic Party (PD) and grab votes from potential opponent Silvio Berlusconi. On Thursday, Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi, 37, launched in Verona his campaign for the primaries that within the next two and a half months should determine who will lead the Italian centre-left in elections due by April.
"I am not afraid of stealing the votes of those who have supported Berlusconi until now," he said. But his ambition to unseat 60-year-old PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani and a pledge to move away from alliances with hard-left parties has earned him the enmity of many colleagues, who even dismiss him as a Berlusconi stooge.
"Renzi seems to be supported mainly by those who do not want the PD to govern, starting from centre-right politicians and newspapers," Massimo D'Alema, a former prime minister and foreign minister, told the centrist Corriere della Sera newspaper earlier this month.
Berlusconi made the same point on Sunday: "Under the banner of the PD, Renzi is pushing forward our ideas, exactly our ideas ... so best of luck." Renzi was quick to reject the poisonous endorsement. "Berlusconi knows that if we win he will be the first to be consigned to the rubbish bin," he wrote on Twitter. In his Verona speech, Renzi eschewed traditional left-wing rallying cries such as defending labour rights, taxing the rich and criticising financial markets, while his podium was bare of all PD symbols.
Renzi comes from a moderate, Catholic background, setting him apart from many of his colleagues who have a communist past, including D'Alema and Bersani. He has pledged to confine Italy's ageing political class "to the rubbish bin," tapping into widespread resentment against an elite that is seen as corrupt and is mostly blamed for the country's current economic crisis.
But others have chosen to attack the Florence mayor for his lack of experience. "The idea that Italy could be represented by Renzi rather than by (current premier Mario) Monti at the next summit with (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel makes me laugh," the leader of the centrist Catholic UDC party Pier Ferdinando Casini said earlier this month.
Luca Ricolfi, a sympathetic commentator on the Turin-based daily La Stampa, wrote Sunday that Renzi faces an "uphill" struggle because PD supporters have a "superiority complex." "The average left-wing militant simply cannot conceive that someone who voted for Berlusconi could be a decent person. So he cannot understand why you should court his vote. So Renzi is simply uncomprehensible to him," Ricolfi wrote.
On Corriere della Sera, Aldo Grasso noted that Renzi "is hated more than he is loved. Can someone who is so discredited within his party ranks win the elections?" he asked in a front-page editorial also on Sunday. Rules and dates for the centre-left primaries still have to be decided, but they are expected to be completed by early December.
According to a September poll by the Demos institute, Bersani would prevail with 43.5 per cent, with Renzi at 27.5 per cent and Nichi Vendola, leader of the more left-wing SEL party, receiving 21.6 per cent. Another recent survey from Istituto Piepoli indicated that Renzi and Bersani were running neck-and-neck at 32 per cent among the electorate of the PD, while Renzi was ahead of Bersani by 25 to 12 per cent among the population at large. The surveys were worrying for Berlusconi, 75, who is still refusing to say whether he will run again as prime minister next year: according to Demos, 76 per cent of Italians do not want him to come back.
Comments
Comments are closed.