No second Democratic candidate primaries and back straight to the program table, starting with support for Ukraine. The messages of Elly Schlein delivered inside and outside the party, they are the indicator of a secretary determined to continue in the race to Palazzo Chigi despite the signs of nervousness coming from the party and the pressure from the allies.
From Brussels, where she flew to participate in the naming of the Parliament Building after David Sassoli, Schlein confirms the line of support by all means to the Ukrainian people. “A just peace cannot be a surrender to the aggressor’s reasons”, says the dem leader. And to those who ask her whether European values should be defended by supporting Kiev, she replies clearly: “Yes, certainly. And David Sassoli had been declared persona non grata” by Moscow “and he was also proud of it”.
The message to the allies of the Democratic Party
A message also to the allies of the coalition such as Conte, Fratoianni and Bonelli pressing for the convocation of the program tabledespite the distance that still exists on the issue of weapons in Kiev. The secretary, a few days ago, listed the priorities of her party in connection with the Democratic Party’s political school in Ventotene. Which correspond to what the center-left has implemented in these four years, from the minimum wage to the reduction of working hours, from investments in healthcare to the housing plan. On the foreign policy level, then, there is the common commitment to peace in Palestine, the subject of the first joint motion signed by the Pd, M5s and Avs two years ago.
Schleine and the wait for Friday’s direction
With these assumptions, in the Democratic Party we look to Friday 2 October, the day of the directionwith a mixture of curiosity and fear. The agenda reads the secretary’s report and appointment of the commissioner of the Cosenza federation. From the report we expect to know when the center-left table will be convened on the program, to know if there will be primaries and, if necessary, with what rules: single shift or double shift, openness to other candidacies by the secretary, voting in person or online. Of course, the rules are established with the allies of the coalition, as Schlein repeats to his men, but the Democrats of the various areas would like to listen to the secretary’s indications from her own voice.
Some clues, or something more, have arrived in the last few hours Igor Taruffihead of the party organization and Schlein’s ambassador to the internal currents. It is Taruffi who says that the only name on the field for the Democratic Party is that of Schlein, thus rejecting the reformist pressure for Giorgio Gori.
The Gori hypothesis and the double shift
The internal minority mentioned the name of the former mayor of Bergamo in an anti-Conte vein, but only in the case of primaries double shiftso as not to risk ending up favoring the M5s leader: the reasoning is that, with the double shift, Gori could attract the votes of those who do not recognize themselves as part of the left as interpreted by Schlein. In the second round, then, that consensus taken away from other competitors could return to Schlein. With the single round, however, a candidacy from Gori would do nothing but take away ground from the dem leader and favor Conte’s victory, a nightmare hypothesis for the reformists themselves.
Taruffi’s words, however, seem to definitively distance this possibility and also the hypothesis of resorting to paragraph 3 of article five of the statute. The law provides that, if the Democratic Party joins coalitions and primaries are used to identify the candidate for the position of President of the Council of Ministers, the national assembly establishes the methods of presentation and selection of any other candidatures, in addition to those of the national secretary, which will be admitted and subsequently presented to the coalition. To do this, a vote of the assembly is needed, the numbers of which are clearly in favor of the secretary. It is therefore difficult to imagine a vote that does not correspond to the indications of the Nazarene. Some more elements than Friday’s direction could arrive tomorrow, during the national secretariat meeting called at six in the evening.
The Ukraine knot
The other knot that the secretary is called upon to untie is that of the program table. The allies have made it known that they are ready: “We cannot reunite alone”, he joked days ago Giuseppe Conte referring to the wait for a nod from the Democratic Party. The signal has arrived, again with Taruffi: “We have been ready since April”, he announced. The points indicated by Schlein are those on which the oppositions in Parliament march together, from work to the minimum wage through healthcare and schools.
The position on Ukraine remains to be clarified. The no to weapons it is a point from which Giuseppe Conte has no intention of deflecting, and so do Nicola Fratoianni and Angelo Bonelli. Schlein, on the other hand, finds himself having to defend the Democratic Party’s line – full support for Ukraine accompanied by a diplomatic effort that sees the European Union as the protagonist with a “single negotiator” – from the implicit and non-implicit discontent of parts of his party, inside and outside Parliament. The words of the secretary of the Young Democrats in Reggio Emilia on the defectors and the controversies that followed give the measure of these tensions.