The centrists launch the challenge to shift the axis of the Democratic Party

The Milan-Orvieto axis, on the one hand. Brescia, on the other. The game of the Democratic Party and the center-left to come is being played at the vertices of this triangle. In Milan, Catholics in and around the Democratic Party meet to ask for more space in the party, but above all to christen Ernesto Maria Ruffini, the former director of the Revenue Agency to whom they seem to want to entrust their destinies. Ruffini rejects the idea of ​​the “superman”, but invites us to “talk about ideas”.

His starts from the memory of David Sassoli and how the president of the European Parliament who passed away three years ago managed to put together “the Ursula majority, for two legislatures”. We need to aim for that model to build the alternative to the right in Italy, is the reasoning. A precise reference, that of the Ursula majority, which makes the Five Star Movement’s ears ring. Because, if the M5s vote was decisive for the departure of the first Commission led by Von der Leyen, in this second legislature the Five Stars voted convincingly against it.

It is not a detail that Ruffini spoke during the first official release of Comunità Democratica, the association promoted by the dem senator Graziano Delrio to gather the voices of the Catholic world in and around the Democratic Party. If Ruffini’s reference were to the current Ursula majority, it would be an alternative point of view to that of the Democratic Party secretary who, albeit with considerable effort, has so far tried to keep the dialogue with Giuseppe Conte firm in view of a future alliance.

And it is not even a detail that Ruffini’s intervention received the applause of a well-defined center-left segment: from Maria Elena Boschi (Italia Viva), to the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala, passing through the Pd components of Energia Popolare and Base Reformist represented in Milan, as well as by Graziano Delrio, by Lorenzo Guerini.

Four hundred kilometers further south, in Orvieto, the proposed reasoning seems to lead in the same direction. The audience is that of Liberia Eguale, a cultural association that has met annually in the city of Terni for 25 years now. Enrico Morando, who is the president of the association, underlines the need to restore to the Democratic Party its majoritarian vocation, of government, and its function as the pivot of the centre-left coalition.

For Morando, “we need to work on the development, through discussion between reformists, of a platform for a credible proposal for a government alternative to the centre-right. A credible proposal for an alternative which does not yet exist today. The perimeter of the discussion, therefore , is very well defined: the reformists who, in the Pd galaxy, represent the motion that was defeated by Elly Schlein at the last congress, but which also includes the centrists of Italia Viva ed Azione who applauds Morando.

If in Milan the most awaited name is Ruffini, in Orvieto it is Paolo Gentiloni. Both ended up in the centre-left totofederatore, they carefully avoided lending themselves to the game. The first underlining that “before the names you need a political proposal”, the second offering a smile to the journalists who questioned him on the point. The last vertex of the triangle is Brescia. Some dem exponents, from the provincial secretary Michele Zanardi to the councilor Miriam Cominelli, organize “Something of the Left”.

Moretti’s title says a lot about the initiative designed to put forward proposals around which to build the centre-left alternative. Among the first to intervene is Pierluigi Bersani. The speech of the former minister and former PD secretary is an explicit message to his Catholic colleagues gathered in Milan and Orvieto. “The Catholic world? Big time. The historical left had nothing else in mind than this meeting”, between the left itself and Catholics: “But someone talks about it as if we were in Ruini’s time and not Bergoglio’s”, says Bersani. It is obvious that these two different sensibilities must always be put to the test of new things in the world. A party cannot exist without discussion. But the discussion must be had all together, not everyone on one side.”

And on the construction of the centre-left, the construction site of ideas that Ruffini talks about, Bersani’s proposal envisages that “the three parties that have already been in coherent opposition for two years” should “start”. That is, Pd, M5s and Avs. Andrea Orlando, a leading exponent of the left-wing dem, does not believe in the dichotomy between “between lay people and Catholics” as much as that “between those who still have a religious faith in the market, those who are more skeptical and those who have come to their senses. I don’t believe in an extreme meaning of the majority vocation and I do not exclude that something may remain outside the Democratic Party. But not ‘the Catholics’: the liberal and moderate forces opposed to the regressive involution of the country”.