Centre-Left, why Conte's anti-NATO demonstration marks a furrow with the PD that Meloni will take advantage of

One: "Giving signals today of openness towards Vladimir Putin while Kiev is under the bombs and just when Europe should close ranks in support of Ukraine is wrong" (here the reference is to the passage of the M5s resolution presented to the Chamber of Deputies in which it asks "not to exclude a priori and pro futuro a possible collaboration with Russia" on gas supply, a passage on which the PD and even Avs voted against): "There is also an anti-NATO demonstration by the M5S with other movements but be careful, because some of those movements are pro-Putin. So when Conte specifies that he is not pro-Putin, I take note, but his fellow-travellers must also correspond' (and here the reference is to the Nato counter-summit organised in The Hague by M5s leader Giuseppe Conte together with various parties of the Eurosceptic left and the red-brown party of German Sahra Wagenknecht).

Indeed, it is an absolute novelty to see a former premier (and Conte was one for more than three years last term) organise a protest demonstration against a NATO summit. Yet among the leaders of the PD, the only voice that rises strongly in the media while the event is taking place is that of another former premier, Paolo Gentiloni, who served on the Ursula Commission from 2018 to 2024 as head of the Economy. After the vote against in Montecitorio to the 'pro-Putin' motion by the allies of the wide camp, in fact, the order of the stable left from Largo del Nazareno is not to underline Conte's positions and not to comment or attack: 'He lives off our polemics'. To pretend nothing, therefore, at least while one can. So as not to break relations with the main ally on the eve of an important round of regional elections (in autumn there will be votes in Veneto, Tuscany, Marche, Campania and Puglia), but also because PD secretary Elly Schlein fears a drain of votes from the PD to the M5s in the 'pacifist' basin.

The underlying hope is that the Pentastelite leader will play his internal coalition competition game but eventually, when it is time to build the coalition, come to his senses. But out of the notebook among the Dems, Conte's latest positions, no longer only against Ursula von der Leyen's EU rearmament plan but even anti-NATO and pro-Putin, have sown bewilderment. "Peace is not a cowardly disengagement,' ultra-reformist MEP Pina Picierno told Il Sole 24 Ore. 'It does not mean thinking of self-absolution by staging counter-demonstrations to say that NATO is ugly and bad: the left capable of governing at international summits is inside, negotiating, and not in front of the gates. That is not government culture, but cheap populism.

Certainly if Conte's position remains this, i.e. against the strengthening of European defence and against NATO, it is hard to see how the Pd can build a credible coalition for the alternative to the Meloni government. And the first to realise this is the Prime Minister herself, who not surprisingly uses double standards with the opposition parties in an attempt to dig her heels in even deeper: on the one hand she chastises and goads Conte by reminding him that it was he who signed the NATO agreement to increase spending to 2% of GDP ("signing commitments and not respecting them is not my way of doing things"), on the other hand she appreciates the interventions in the House by reformists Graziano Delrio and Alessandro Alfieri, who are critical of the modalities but not of European rearmament per se, and responds in a timely manner.

And Schlein, who on the day of the US bombing of Iran held a bipartisan posture by phoning Meloni? The line of not breaking the thread of the alliance with the M5s has so far produced a half-hearted result: in favour of common EU Defence but against the rearmament of individual states (and without clarifying how a true EU Defence can be built without more spending). In other words, a position that distinguishes the PD within the same family of European Socialists, given that even the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez much cited by Schlein is in favour of the so-called Ursula Plan and rather discusses how and how much. The risk for the PD, born as a governmental left, is that in order not to go against Conte and to 'chase' the same slice of the electorate it will find itself more on the Left's positions, outside the European government, than on those of the Pse ("and here it is not a question of losing the train for the government, but of losing the very soul", notes more than one reformist).