The moral question raised in 1981 by Enrico Berlinguer did not have to do with an abstract idea of honesty or moral purity, but with the relationship between politics and power. In the words that the secretary of the Italian Communist Party (Pci) entrusted to Eugenio Scalfari, and which converged in a famous interview published in Repubblica, there was no moralism. Instead, there was a dry but very harsh denunciation of the system of power that had been consolidated since the post-war period in particular, but not only, around the Christian Democrats.
“Parties no longer do politics”, Berlinguer stated in that interview, claiming the diversity of the PCI and explaining that the other political forces had transformed themselves into machines of power and clientele, and managed the most disparate interests with no longer “any relationship with emerging human needs and requirements, or distorting them, without pursuing the common good”. “Their own organizational structure”, the PCI secretary went on to say, “has now conformed to this model, and they are no longer organizers of the people, formations that promote their civil maturation and initiative: they are rather federations of currents, of camarillas, each with a ‘boss’ and ‘sub-bosses’”.
The heart of the reasoning, as is evident, was above all political: “The moral question, in today’s Italy, is one with the occupation of the state by the government parties and their currents, it is one with gang warfare is one and the same with their conception of politics and with their methods of government, which must simply be abandoned and overcome”. Unfortunately, in the last thirty years – those of the so-called second republic – that system denounced by Berlinguer seems instead to have become an ideal heritage shared by all parties.
The words of forty years ago are also applicable with disturbing precision to the political formations that today are placed in the centre-left, in fact now almost indistinguishable from the government parties of the time in terms of the interests and even the values represented. As many observers have underlined to explain the reasons for the defeat of the Democratic Party (PD) in the last general elections, this above all concerns the Democratic Party, an organization that was born and developed as an instrument of power rather than as a party of ideas. And that having now lost power he has entered his deepest crisis. But of course it is a problem that does not concern only the Democratic Party.
An attempt has been made to limit responsibilities to the activity of individuals, without addressing the political knots that underlie everything
In short, re-read today, Berlinguer’s words are able to explain the crisis of the current centre-left parties. And it is above all a political crisis. For the leaders of those parties to admit it would be to admit their cultural defeat. And it is also for this reason that among those managers it is often difficult to answer on the subject of distortions in the relationship between power and politics, even when the questions have nothing to do with the involvement of the judiciary in investigations. And everything becomes more difficult when that involvement – directly or indirectly – takes place. This is what is happening these days, with the news relating to an alleged corruption system nestled within the European institutions, which is being investigated by the Belgian judiciary and which allegedly involves Italian politicians associated with the centre-left.
Thus, in recent days, the left has remained mostly silent, or almost so. And, when it was decided to speak, instead of tackling the political question – i.e. the transformation, even on the left, of parties into “federations of camarillas” at the service of charismatic leaders – they preferred to sink the blow on the judicial aspects, they preferred to appear be indignant and give in to a moralism that flares up quickly, just as quickly it fades away. But it can’t be surprising: after all, it’s a way to try to limit responsibilities to the activity of individuals, and therefore to try to save the situation without addressing the political knots that underlie everything. Even if those knots undermine the foundations of the shack much more than individual legal cases.
Hence the scandal was defined as “unacceptable” in the Democratic Party, and maximum inflexibility and intransigence towards those who might be involved were announced. Thrown on the plate like this, without any kind of analysis, useless words remain, and so familiar as to be worn out by now.
Nor can those contained in an interview by Roberto Speranza, leader of Article 1, a formation in which one of the politicians involved militate, come out in the press with a disturbing headline: “No guarantees on Panzeri, we are the ones asking for clarity”. In those words there is all the bewilderment of a left which, by now thirty years ago, competed with other forces in entrusting the judiciary with a moralizing function that finds no space in the constitution but found much of it in the ideal and political void that it also had swallowed the left and still envelops it.
In this desert, the only one to make a real political analysis seems to be Gianni Cuperlo, deputy of the Democratic Party, of which he was also president in the past. “The left”, he wrote speaking in the press, “is called to deal with a moral issue that has penetrated within itself and that no shortcut, individual or judicial, can absolve”. Today’s moral question lies in fact “in having corrupted not and not only individuals, but the very notion of politics”. But for now his voice remains a voice in the desert.
Cuperlo also affirms what has been evident for many years already, and which the political leaders of the centre-left have ignored, perhaps distracted by the belief that the strength of their power was sufficient justification for the exercise of that same power. In short, convinced of the truth contained in a famous joke by Giulio Andreotti: “Power wears down those who don’t have it”. And instead power has worn out an entire political class, the one that on the left has embodied it in the last three decades, and which out of ignorance, convenience or conformism still appears substantially unaware of the reasons for its own crisis, and even of its own responsibilities in that same crisis.