Italy’s opposition wonders if it’s time to get radical again

According to a piece in Foreign Policy, some Italians are hoping for a socialist comeback following a crushing political defeat. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

This month, in a cramped party conference room in the Pratello district of Bologna, a young man dressed like a precocious suburban 12-year-old was trying to convince a gaggle of old socialists to vote for his choice of party leader, a carefully centrist establishment man. It was going about as well as you might expect.

“I have no idea why anybody would vote for this neoliberal,” said Mirna Magnani, a member at the back, scoffing. When the speaker quoted Antonio Gramsci, the iconic founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), she wondered aloud if he was trying to exploit communist nostalgia. Another woman piped up behind her. “I’m an old communist, and I’d never vote for him!”

Local members of Italy’s Democratic Party (PD) had convened for primaries ahead of a bitter leadership contest on Feb. 26 that will determine the fate of the Italian opposition—and that could provide a blueprint for post-populist movements in Italy and elsewhere. The PD, along with every political faction to the left of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, was devastated in last year’s snap election by the far-right coalition headed by Giorgia Meloni.

But the question about where to turn next is particularly fraught in Bologna. “Red Bologna” was once the heartland of the PCI, the largest communist party in the Western world before a divisive “turn” saw its eventual transformation into the PD, a powerful centrist alliance that gutted public spending and turned the markets loose over a series of intermittent governments. Only in Bologna—a communist redoubt of red-tiled roofs, anarchist graffiti, and locally owned cooperatives—did the PD hold onto some vestige of its heritage.

Even today, the Bolognese PD can mobilize thousands of local voters, many of them party members who double as volunteers for public services such as food banks and schools for children with learning disabilities. If “communist” is a dirty word elsewhere in Italy, “neoliberal” is far worse here. Now, there is a struggle between those members who want to resurrect the old socialist spirit that they believe was long ago betrayed and others who want to only capitalize on that past—while covertly undermining it.

The PD’s two leadership candidates, Elly Schlein and Stefano Bonaccini, both came up as colleagues in the same Bolognese political scene that remains as formidable a power center as it was in the days of the PCI. Both candidates are pitching themselves as inheritors of tradition, and the differences between them are both stark and superficial.

Elly Schlein is the liberal progressive, in the American mold. Young and idealistic, she has been typecast as an “Italian Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” for her emphasis on climate change, social justice, and inequality. She advocates openly for the redistribution of wealth and wants to do away with the endless impenetrable “tendencies” and “sub-tendencies” that dominate the PD’s internal politics. She was disproportionately supported by the more radical PD members in parts of Bologna, but elsewhere in the country, where the PD’s roots have largely been eradicated, Bonaccini is the man.

Bonaccini is the president of Emilia-Romagna, the region of which Bologna is the capital. Where Schlein has her roots in an Atlanticist, liberal milieu and proposes to dismantle the system that produced her, Bonaccini is the polar opposite: a former communist who plays up his working-class heritage and quotes former PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer, only to use that same language—“people’s energy”—to advocate for what leftist critics perceive as standard neoliberal governance. He offers few concrete policies, instead emphasizing “unity” and his years of administrative experience.

To those desperate for a socialist revival, neither candidate is truly satisfactory. In a heated exchange following the candidacy briefings in Bologna, the precocious Bonaccini envoy pointed out that Schlein, the nominal outsider, was supported by a number of the party’s most entrenched figures, including many of the politicians responsible for some of the PD’s most destructive right-wing policies.

The Schlein supporters in the room, who see the candidate as the lesser of two evils, shrugged it off as mere politics. But many of Schlein’s critics view her as just another continuity candidate, cloaked in a superficially novel political framing. Meanwhile, ex-comunista Bonaccini has the favor of the party’s powerful New Labour-style neoliberista wing, which has already embraced Meloni.

These kinds of unintuitive alliances are present in a number of countries, from the United Kingdom to Brazil, as politicians contend with a rising anti-capitalist sentiment wedded to social conservatism. In Italy, they are especially pronounced, exasperating even the most enthusiastic of the PD’s progressive supporters. “They’re choosing people who are strategically useful because they have leftist credentials,” one PD analyst said. “But not too much.”

The PD is also hemorrhaging support to another resurgent, if much newer, force in Italian politics: the Five Star Movement. Five Star began as a populist “anti-politics” experiment under the leadership of comedian Beppe Grillo, but it degraded over two terms in government that saw it ally with almost every faction it had sworn to never do business with, including the far-right League and the PD.

In 2021, it was considered politically dead, but now—almost impossibly—its leader, former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, has achieved newfound popularity by vigorously defending the “citizens’ income,” a vital job-seekers’ allowance that he introduced while in office in 2019—and which the PD subsequently tried to unwind.

Still, Five Star’s history of flip-flopping has left observers wondering whether the latest crusade is wholly opportunistic. “At a certain point, they’ll always drop an issue because it doesn’t work anymore politically and then try another,” said Mario Ricciardi, the editor of the left-wing magazine Il Mulino. But Domenico De Masi, a leftist academic with ties to Five Star, noted that the party today is more coherent, its right wing having long ago fled to pastures more reactionary. One Five Star source argued that the Conte government that introduced the job-seekers’ allowance was one of Italy’s all-time most progressive. While the PD depends on the loyalty of old members, he said, Five Star has a proven track record.

None of the old Bolognese communists, however, were moved by the suggestion that Five Star was a viable leftist alternative—they were only spooked by its ascendancy. In the end, in the cramped chapter conference room, after each member lined up to deliver a searing indictment of Bonaccini’s platform, they almost all went for Schlein, the most convincing progressive of the lot. They awarded her a whopping 91 votes to Bonaccini’s 12.

Both regionally and nationwide, however, Bonaccini maintained a compelling lead and remains the favorite for party leader. To hopeful leftists, it was a dispiriting result, a sign that even an ersatz leftist like Schlein, with her dubious establishment support, didn’t have much of a chance. “It’s sad,” said the PD analyst, who believes supporters of Bonaccini are simply succumbing to pressure from local party bosses. “Our country once had the most powerful communist party in the free world. And now we have this.”