At the end of a year which delivered much less than it had promised for the Italian centre-left, Matteo Renzi’s victory in the Partito Democratico leadership primaries in December provides several reasons for optimism. First of all, the simple fact that he is 39. Italy has long been a country for old men – its political, media, academic and business elites are filled with aging (and often not very talented) men who have doggedly clung on to power for decades. Renzi’s election, along with the emergence of 43-year-old Angelino Alfano from Silvio Berlusconi’s shadow on the centre-right in November and the appointment of 47-year-old Enrico Letta of the PD as prime minister in April, suggests that a generational change is finally occurring at the top of Italian politics.
Second, Renzi promises to bring positive change to the PD, which since its creation has resembled more a vaguely defined political space full of squabbling factions than a political party with clear policies and strong leadership. Indeed, ‘change’ has been a keyword for Renzi, who has styled himself as a ‘rottamatore’ (‘scrapper’), intent on disposing of those failed figures that have dominated the centre-left. To take one obvious example: Massimo D’Alema, the former prime minister and long-time powerbroker, who has come to symbolise the type of PD dinosaur that Renzi wants to make extinct.
Although the sclerotic Italian media continues to seek out D’Alema’s opinion with baffling regularity (imagine if Neil Kinnock gave frequent interviews about Ed Miliband), his generation’s day has gone. Gianni Cuperlo, the preferred candidate of D’Alema, and the former PD leader, Pierluigi Bersani, scored just 18 per cent in the primaries – exactly 50 percentage points behind Renzi. Indeed, Renzi’s primary campaign resembled more a long coronation than a contest. His main opponent had no new ideas and no chance of winning.
The task for Renzi now will be to metamorphose from ‘scrapper’ into ‘builder’. As leader, he can no longer solely play the role of the outsider coming in to remove the driftwood, but will have to do what those before him could not: to construct a party that is united and can win elections. This will not be simple. It has long been suspected – rightly – that Renzi is more popular among the public than within his party, many of whom see him as overly centrist and egocentric. In fact, when a membership ballot was held in November the gap between Renzi and Cuperlo was just six percentage points. The primaries, by contrast, were open to all citizens.
Further complicating matters will be Renzi’s uneasy relationship with the PD in government (which has already seen the deputy finance minister Stefano Fassina resign, on the pretext that Renzi offended him by saying ‘Fassina who?’), led by his party colleague Letta. Although Letta did not stand for the leadership, it remains to be seen whether he will do likewise if and when the party holds primaries for its next candidate as prime minister. Italy being Italy, we may not have to wait too long to find out.
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Duncan McDonnell is Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute
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