The divisions in the wider field are fake. And that’s a real problem

Stubbornly united or sadly united? The resolution tabled yesterday in the Chamber of Deputies by the broad coalition (PD, M5S, AVS) on the use of SAFE funds highlights an interesting – and often overlooked – political reality concerning the policy identity of the centre-left with its ‘Schonte’ (Schlein+Conte) orientation. The divisions that have emerged in recent days over the Ukraine issue – with the PD secretary ‘firmly’ in favour of sending arms to Kyiv and the M5S president ‘firmly’ in favour of ending military aid to Kyiv – have helped to fuel an illusion: the idea that the centre-left, at heart, is made up of many competing factions on important issues, all keen to temper the populism of their allies. On foreign policy, on Ukraine, certain divisions do indeed exist. But the reasons why the divisions between the PD, the M5S and the AVS have caused such a stir in recent days form part of a specific strand of journalistic narrative in which the news represents the exception to a rule, not its opposite. Within the centre-left, the explicit obsession with erasing the progressive camp’s reformist past (where ‘erasing the reformist past’ often means erasing the Renzi and Gentiloni eras) has meant that the PD, the M5S and the AVS have no reason to argue about anything, or almost nothing, and however difficult it may be – as Francesco Verderami rightly noted yesterday in the *Corriere della Sera* – to imagine reading a ‘stubbornly unified’ foreign policy programme, as Elly Schlein likes to repeat, on Ukraine, it is, on the other hand, very easy to imagine drafting a unified programme on most of the other issues upon which the alternative to Giorgia Meloni & Co. will be built.

Ukraine – that is, division – is the exception. Programmatic symmetry – that is, sharing – is the norm. Yesterday, with the centre-left’s ‘stubbornly unified’ resolution, the norm was confirmed: namely, the ease with which the PD, AVS and M5S tend to find common ground, even at the cost of steamrollering over the heads of the few reformists within the PD who still have the strength to make their ideas heard, even at the risk of being left off the next electoral lists. To put it bluntly: the broad coalition is calling for the use of a European instrument (SAFE), originally designed for defence, to fund objectives not envisaged by the European Union. To put it crudely: go ahead and activate SAFE, but to do what we say, not what Europe allows. In yesterday’s resolution, however, there is another interesting passage that acts as a major unifying force for the ‘broad coalition’: criticising the government for failing to manage the deficit responsibly and, moments later, suggesting – in a departure from the European approach to net expenditure – that a higher deficit be used to fund healthcare, poverty alleviation and energy. 

On the economic front, as Luciano Capone wrote in this newspaper a few days ago, the parallels between the allies are even more evident, as can easily be deduced by looking back at the sixteen joint amendments to the budget – a sort of broad-based economic programme – which, taken together, involved a request for investment totalling around 25 billion, against identified funding of just 2 billion. Stubbornly united or sadly united? The same could be said of their views on labour: in the June 2025 referendum, as you will recall, the PD backed five ‘Yes’ votes and the M5S four ‘Yes’ votes. The same could be said about renewables: in theory, the M5S, PD and AVS call for more renewables everywhere, but where they govern together – from Sardinia to Umbria via Tuscany – the regional governments go to great lengths to create regulations specifically designed to make the construction of new plants impossible. The same argument could also be made regarding pensions, with the PD having embraced the traditional Five Star Movement line of progressively dismantling the Fornero reform, as demonstrated by the convergence in their policies on extending the ‘Opzione donna’ scheme, lowering the retirement age and eliminating the automatic adjustment of eligibility criteria to life expectancy (when, months ago, the government allowed the adjustment provided for under current legislation to take effect in part, the PD, M5S and AVS accused it of making the Fornero reform worse, of defrauding workers and of inflicting a severe social blow upon them). Stubbornly united or sadly united?

The same principle, essentially, applies to the justice system, and the M5S’s and the PD and the AVS, has allowed them to feel entirely at ease in setting out the reasons for their ‘No’ to judicial reform and in refraining from voting in favour, two days ago, of the establishment in the Chamber of Deputies of a Day of Remembrance for the victims of miscarriages of justice – heaven forbid that the progressive bloc should do anything to hold the ‘party of the public prosecutors’ to account. The PD, M5S and AVS, even in Europe, often share positions of gentle unanimity, and they stand by them even at the cost of distancing themselves from the socialist mainstream and the votes of the PES. They were all opposed to the European Pact on Asylum and Migration. They were all against the new European Stability Pact. On foreign policy, of course, there are nuances – an exception to the rule regarding Ukraine – but on many other issues the alignment is perfect. For all of them – the PD, the M5S and the AVS – Francesca Albanese’s stance on the Middle East and Israel, which tends towards the demonisation not of Netanyahu but of the Jewish people, is an absolute point of reference; and the silence of recent days regarding Hamas’s desire to rearm itself to the hilt, and the timidity shown in recent months in the fight against anti-Zionism – which is nothing more than a presentable form for blithely conveying anti-Semitism – are there to prove it.

Reaching a consensus on Ukraine won’t be easy, we know, but the way in which, over recent months, the PD and AVS – in the name of putting the past behind us – have chosen to align themselves with the Five Star Movement’s platform on justice, the Middle East, Europe, migrants, and macroeconomic balances, is a mark of quality, so to speak, which forces us to remember that the problem with the broad coalition (with Renzi standing on the sidelines but not entirely outside a coalition whose main aim is to scrap ‘Renzism’) is not that it is divided (if only) but rather that of being sadly united even on issues over which a coalition wishing to present itself as an alternative government should be arguing for higher standards, not stubbornly settling for lower ones.