The idea of candidate Letizia Moratti with the centre-left in the next regional elections in Lombardy has met with much resistance in recent days in the Democratic Party. Instead, it is liked outside the Democratic Party and by the large moderate national newspapers, who have written a lot about it and with very passionate tones.
Lists have been compiled of the good things that Moratti did when she was mayor of Milan, perhaps skipping over others, such as the controversy over the lack of patronage granted to the international gay and lesbian film festival and gay pride, of which you say today repented. It has also been written of how, already in the past, the Democratic Party has forged alliances with centre-right politicians and parties to govern the country together, or in any case has welcomed many center-right exponents into its ranks. But above all, much has been written about the reasons that led Moratti to break with the right.
“I hoped that a liberal, popular, reformist soul would prevail in the centre-right, […] I had to see that we are dealing with a centre-right that has betrayed itself,” Moratti explained in an interview with Il Giorno. Many have seen this breakup as an opportunity. Among these, there is Luigi Zanda, leader of the Democratic Party, who explained to Corriere della Sera: “It is a political step that does you credit and which it would be wrong not to share”. Il Foglio also follows the same line: “Moratti’s exit from the right-wing pole with clear anti-sovereign, pro-European, pro-vax motivations could be a tear to be exploited”.
The problem is not Letizia Moratti’s political profile, but the idea of politics that seems to emerge from this debate
To many, in short, his long political history in the Italian right must have seemed forgettable and the fact that, as Aldo Cazzullo wrote in the Corriere della Sera, Moratti was “a key figure of Berlusconi”. After having been president of Rai between 1994 and 1996, in fact, she was minister twice with Silvio Berlusconi, then mayor of Milan with the center-right, and from the beginning of 2021 until a few days ago also vice president of the Lombardy region led by the Northern League player Attilio Fontana. Indeed, you have tried to describe the strong perplexity widespread on the left towards you as an ideological prejudice. And Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of Corriere della Sera and Sole 24 Ore, went so far as to say that there would even be “a disdainful class judgment” against Moratti.
Be that as it may, the problem is not that of Letizia Moratti’s political profile or the “freshening up” that they are trying to give to that profile. The question goes far beyond a possible candidacy of hers – more and more distant – with the centre-left, and has to do with the very idea of politics that seems to emerge from this public discussion.
In fact, people are reasoning as if it were completely normal to entrust the leadership of the left-wing coalition to a right-wing politician, without even explaining the political reasons for such an operation. It is only argued that it could bring electoral victory, and that is all. Once again everything ends in a tactical operation. Politics is renounced in exchange for power. And no one seems touched by the doubt that the cultural defeat of the Democratic Party lies precisely in the renunciation of politics.
It is precisely that renunciation that transformed it into an organization dedicated only to power, and therefore a candidate to get lost as soon as power went to others, which happened promptly with the victory of Giorgia Meloni’s right wing. Everyone or almost everyone rightly underlined it, in the aftermath of the defeat in the general elections of 25 September. Yet the same people who until a few days ago accused the Democratic Party of being a party capable of being interested only in the management of power, now support an operation whose horizon is the seizure of power, without other political reasons.
In the end, the feeling is that all this has very little to do with the elections in Lombardy and much to do with the future national political balance. And that, in a phase in which the centre-left, with a congress just around the corner, appears lost and forced to re-found itself, many are trying to build a levee to keep the Democratic Party as far to the right as possible. The fact is that, if we do not resume thinking in political terms, and therefore strategic as well as tactical, we will also be able to conquer the Lombardy region but at the national level we risk continuing to lose against a radical and ideological right, such as the one led by Giorgia Meloni.