No to the name in the PD symbol: Schlein's retreat and the 20% survival threshold

'Either I run everywhere or we put my name in the PD symbol'. This is, more or less, the fork in the road that the Elly Schlein secretary of the Dem party gathered Sunday in the leadership to approve the lists for the European elections. Then, with the ballot boxes closed in Basilicata, the retreat via Instagram:there will be no leader's name in the symbol and there will be no candidature of her everywhere but only, as a leading candidate, in the Centre and Islands.

A reversal to all intents and purposes, then, given the uprising of all the currents that supported her at last year's congress: from Dario Franceschini to the left of Andrea Orlando and Giuseppe Provenzano to Nicola Zingaretti. But why was the Dem secretary so close to making such a break with the PD tradition? Certainly the judicial storm that has hit the party in Bari and Puglia has weighed heavily, with investigations into vote rigging and corruption that have affected the city council and above all the regional one led by Michele Emiliano. In other words, one of the 'cacicchi' to whom the secretary, who came from the movements and until the time of the primaries was not a member of the PD had sworn war during the congressional campaign.

What had irritated Schlein in recent weeks was not so much the decision of the M5s leader Giuseppe Conte to blow up the Giallorossi and Bari primaries and leave Emiliano's council with the cry 'legality is a non-negotiable value for us', but rather the power system that had taken root over the years in the Puglia of the 'ras' and was brought to light by the investigations. Conte had also addressed the most burning words to her: 'Change the PD before the PD changes you'. And Schlein's response was instinctively twofold: first, the decision to print the eyes of the historic leader of the Italian Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer, the inventor and champion of the 'moral question', on her PD cards; then the temptation - which was overturned - to put her name on the PD symbol, imitating a right-wing custom also adopted by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for her party, Fratelli d'Italia. The intention was precisely that of throwing all the weight of her freshness and, so to speak, her extraneousness to the history of the PD to send the message of that radical renewal repeatedly announced and that in the compilation of the lists for the European elections could in fact be expressed only with a few faces (Lucia Annunciata, Cecilia Strada and the pacifist Marco Tarquinio). Almost as if the PD were precisely the bad company described by Conte.

In this way, however, Schlein has exposed herself not only to criticism from the founder of the Ulivo and first card-carrying member of the PD, Romano Prodi ('this is how you ask voters to give their vote to a person who certainly won't go to Brussels if he wins: these are wounds to democracy that dig a ditch'), but - paradoxically - also to the reversal of her own criticism against the excessive personalisation of politics. Schlein has always contrasted the PD as a 'community' with the personal parties of the right and has always used the 'we' instead of the 'I' to distinguish himself from the renzian season (but even Matteo Renzi never put his name in the PD symbol when he was its secretary).

In addition to this contradiction there is another, more subtle but no less insidious one: evidently Schlein, who hopes to get through the European elections unscathed also thanks to her personal contribution, is already aiming to personalise the clash with Meloni for the future political elections in 2027. A hand-to-hand fight between two premier candidates that does not sit well with the fierce opposition that the PD, precisely on Schlein's input, is making in the Senate against the centre-right premierate. Putting the name in the symbol would have implied acceptance of the model, as Annunziata correctly warned in the corner, putting her name 'at the disposal' of the list. "The name in the symbol is the transformation of the PD into a personal party at the very moment when the majority has presented a reform, the premierate, that destroys the current constitutional order. The choice of the name in the symbol puts the PD on the road to accepting the same model. On many things in a party you can mediate but not on issues of this importance'.