Leaders change, but the habit of the Pd to team up with the European left against its Italian opponents remains. In the 2022 election campaign Enrico Letta, with the support of Pedro Sánchez and other socialist leaders, went around Europe claiming that if Giorgia Meloni won, the rule of law in Italy would end: goodbye freedom, no more democracy. After the European elections Elly Schlein, together with the EU Socialists, said that Ursula von der Leyen should not have appointed commissioners representing “far-right” parties, including the Ecr Conservatives, to which Fdi belongs. The target was Raffaele Fitto and it went as we know. She also appealed to “all democratic parties” to reject “any normalization, collaboration or alliance” with those forces. In these operations, all failed, the Psoe, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party led continuously by Sánchez since 2017, has always been at the forefront alongside the Pd. The reason lies in the numbers and affinities. Together with the Pd, which has 21 MEPs, the Spanish socialists, with their 20 elected, are those with the largest national component. Since 2019 the group of EU Socialists, which is the second largest in the chamber and today counts 135 elected members, has been led by the Spaniard Iratxe García Pérez.
Ceuta, chaos among socialists in Brussels: who can jump, Pd in panic
Ceuta has thrown the European left into crisis: on one side the Spanish government president Pedro Sanchez, from the…
Confirmed two years ago in office, García Pérez is Sánchez’s long arm, as well as Meloni’s main opponent in the EU parliament. There is no proposal from the Italian premier that she has not tried to counter with the utmost political force. After the European elections she was interviewed by Repubblica to say that Meloni’s “far right” “wants to attack the Europe of negotiation, diversity, and understanding among the great continental political families.” She demanded that the European People’s Party, the family to which Forza Italia, most EU leaders, the Commission president, and the president of the European Parliament belong, isolate Italy and its leader and never vote together with the Conservatives and other forces to the right of the EPP.
THE TWINNING
The understanding between her and Schlein, in short, was natural. García Pérez announced that the EU Socialists are “totally opposed to the idea of outsourcing migration services,” even if not all the national delegations that make up her group think so. And when, after the Ceuta disaster, the Danish premier Mette Frederiksen, also a socialist, teamed up with Meloni to contest the mistakes made by the Sánchez government, it was the Pd and the Psoe who rose up against her. The foreign affairs head of the Nazareno, Peppe Provenzano, and the Spaniard Javi Lopez, vice president of the EU parliament, wrote to the leaders of the European Socialist Party to declare it “unacceptable” that “a member of our own political family has chosen to align, in a coordinated way, with the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni,” and to ask to “put on trial” the Danish leader at the first available meeting.
The invasion of Ceuta was indeed a very hard blow for the already battered Sánchez and his party, who instead of admitting mistakes are trying to pass everything off as a maneuver orchestrated by Rome against Madrid, helped in this by the Pd. The letter signed by twenty-two of the twenty-seven Union leaders on August 1, asking Brussels to take charge of a situation that Spain cannot manage and contesting “all policies that can act as pull factors, such as the regularization of a very high number of irregular migrants,” left deep wounds: a clear reference to decisions made in Madrid. An initiative promoted by Meloni and Frederiksen, which revealed how strong the discontent in Europe is for Sánchez’s government, also abandoned on this occasion by the other socialist leader, the Maltese Robert Abela.
ATTEMPTED REVENGE
Now the umpteenth proposal to start a monitoring mission on the rule of law in Italy presented by Alessandro Zan, head of Rights in the Schlein secretariat, in agreement with the Spaniards, has been rejected because the EPP blocked it together with the right. This time, however, there was not only the eternal return of the accusation for “the serious attacks by the Meloni government on fundamental freedoms,” to quote Zan himself, or the narrative that in Italy “freedom and democracy are at risk when the far right is in government,” as Schlein said commenting on the “attack” against Ranucci. The revenge instinct of the Spanish socialists was also seen at work, who dreamed of drawing a sanitary cordon around the Italian premier and were isolated by their inability to govern immigration and guarantee security.
