“With the primaries, there is a risk of losing votes,” said former Health Minister Roberto Speranza. And it seems that even the one who many consider the true “immobile engine” of the PD, Dario Franceschini, has expressed doubts. A strange fate for an institution born under the banner of participation and democracy. But strange only up to a certain point, upon closer inspection.
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About twenty years after their inception, it can indeed be said that the Italian primaries have proven to be one of the biggest bluffs that the left has put together. Borrowed from the American electoral system, where they have a very different meaning and a long tradition, they were born precisely under the rhetoric of the most intense participatory rhetoric. And thus as a tool offered to the “left-wing people,” the mythical masses of the past, to choose leaders and therefore also the political line.
Rhetoric, because, even back in the days of Romano Prodi and Walter Veltroni, the leadership groups thought of everything except giving up their power, as would have happened if rules and procedures for conducting the primaries had been established once and for all and especially if the calling of primaries had become mandatory.
EMPTY RITUAL
Instead, with both the rules and the calls becoming “flexible,” the primaries were avoided in moments when they were considered “dangerous” and became a sort of empty secular ritual in other cases. A rite that served to confirm leaders already chosen in the narrowest “magic circles” of the party, or to hinder the rise of “irregulars” and homines novi. A kind of street party, like the May Day celebration, or a demonstration aimed at convincing oneself of still being and always on the “right side.”
The highest point of the bluff was reached with the 2023 election of Elly Schlein as secretary of the Democratic Party, decided by the leadership and the result of a ruthless power struggle that caused the primaries to overturn the choice of the members, who logically should be the only ones to have a say in such circumstances. Cheap moralism on our part?
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Not at all. It is known that politics is the work of elites, often in conflict with each other. And that certain dynamics also recur within parties, whose “internal democracy” is also the result of a more or less honest concealment. Democracy and participation are always somehow conditioned, as the school of political realism teaches us, which among other things was a strength and pride of the old PCI on the left.
What does not fit in this story, however, is precisely the bluff, the systematic action aimed at deceiving militants and sympathizers. The hypocrisy of those who talk about participation while letting people believe that the rule of “one person, one vote” could ever apply in a party does not fit.
And perhaps hypocrisy, more than anything else, is the reason why, over the years, fewer and fewer voters have shown up at the polls, in numbers far from the over four million of the 2005 coalition primaries and the three and a half million of those of the PD two years later. Failure was inevitable after the bluff.
