The PD risks going into the election with nothing to stand on

This unconventional proposal involving Roberto Speranza – a figurehead to lead the centre-left coalition, a political novice barely eighteen or a veteran partisan approaching a hundred – may not be feasible, but it says it all about the PD-led coalition. Names depend on substance, and if there is no political substance – which is the thing in itself, the decisive factor in the art of competition between power dynamics and eventual victory – then it is fine to break the dependency and go to the polls under a name that means nothing. Speranza perhaps cannot even imagine it, but he is a philosopher. Political substance – the essence of the matter – is not a programme, affordable to all, nor is it a person; in the end, everyone is interchangeable. It is something else entirely. A combination of experience, character, collective and personal exposure; a foundation that is at once logical and imaginative, historical and prophetic; a theorem and a poem; or at the very least, a great deal of nerve that inspires confidence and tenacity: this is the substance of politics, and of its individual expression in the capacity to lead. And this thing either exists or it does not. In this particular case, it is not there. Hence the far-fetched yet telling notion of a figurehead who serves as proof of this lack of substance.

There is the leader of the party with the most votes, who in turn was the most popular candidate in absurd open primaries several years ago; a student council president who seems kind and honest, which in itself is no small thing. There is the leader of the second-largest party in terms of electoral support, the most interchangeable person in the world – a highly entertaining character with a strange, subversive effectiveness of her own. There are mayors parading the catwalk, iconic cities, varied yet generic experiences, and fleeting areas of expertise; yet there is no overarching narrative that constitutes a personal story, a convincing and authoritative political perspective on the world and the country – let alone a vision – nor is there the cultural and material momentum, comprising the most sophisticated rhetorical abstractions and the most concrete promises, which underpins a credible candidacy.

Such is the fate and insubstantiality of the PD, a party in which the only serious elements appear to be the much-maligned factions, because the rest of the amalgam was condemned as "a failure" by one of its cynical founders and deemed expendable in favour of a career as a filmmaker, novelist and vague moralist by another founder. The centre-left, for the time being – with all its statistical chances of victory or a draw, and all the weaknesses in the opposing camp that the broad coalition could exploit – seems to be built on sand. The coalition might just pull it off, because the opposition, by definition, has the leeway to prevail against the majority, but it would be a surprise first and foremost for the coalition itself. It lacks experience of the tragic, of the harsh realities of the times in which it lives; it operates at full throttle like a blender when what is needed is not, I won’t say a tank, but a well-oiled, steel-built machine. The idea of a figurehead candidate to lead the government could only have occurred to – however ill-advised it may be – a sort of wise politician capable of sensing from within, malgré soi, just how wretched and flaccid the relationship between the thing and the name really is.