Long live the primaries

No: leave the primaries alone. Francesco Piccolo is not just a great writer. He is also a keen and shrewd observer of the moods, obsessions, fears, anxieties and desires of the progressive voter, and yesterday in La Repubblica he gave free rein to a sentiment widespread across the centre-left. In essence, he advises against impulsive decisions, warns against choices that might later be regretted, and urges the party not even to contemplate selecting a prime ministerial candidate from the broader political spectrum through the primaries.

Francesco Piccolo’s argument is simple and, in its own way, straightforward: the primaries are too contentious, and when this conflict intersects with a coalition that is highly fragile, deeply divisive, extremely hesitant and on the brink of collapse, the risk of disaster is just around the corner. Therefore, he argues, it would be wiser to postpone, to seek alternative solutions, and to make a modest creative effort to pull out of the hat—perhaps not an 18-year-old or a partisan, but at least a figure capable of finding common ground and uniting the divided factions in search of a leader who can help them achieve that unity. Piccolo captures a widespread mood within the centre-left, but we would venture to say to Francesco Piccolo and to the progressive voters who felt less alone after reading his piece in La Repubblica that not holding primaries is not only utter nonsense but is simply another way of avoiding resolving the problems that have emerged in recent days, merely at the mere mention, on the left, of the word ‘primaries’.

Primaries are not merely a celebration for the people. They are one of the most innovative, boldest, most powerful, most disruptive and most effective tools ever to have emerged in our country’s political history. Primaries create competition; competition generates rivalry; rivalry produces innovation; innovation brings simplification; simplification forces leaders to get stuck in, to put themselves on the line, to test their abilities; and when a party or coalition abandons primaries, it loses everything it ought to be seeking in order to create an alternative. Primaries work precisely because they divide, because they create conflict, because they force factions to take a hard look at themselves, because they force parties to confront their own taboos, because they push coalitions to try to overcome the barriers of identity politics, and because, ultimately, they help coalitions or parties to field what is needed to try to win elections: ideas, proposals, messages and leadership.

A coalition that looks in the mirror and realises it lacks leaders up to the task – rather than shutting itself away in the gloomy darkness of a fireside, entrusting the choice of a candidate leader to a private dining room in a restaurant – should do everything in its power to respond, to make up for its shortcomings, to find a leader who is up to the task, or to push those leaders who are not up to the task to take a leap forward. If the leaders are not up to the job, alternatives are necessary, and it is curious to have to remind a party founded on primaries (the PD), whose leader would not have become such without the primaries (Schlein), an ally of a party that for years has flooded the airwaves with its own disruptive message that democracy must start from the grassroots (the M5S), which has selected or legitimised some of its most important leaders – Prodi, Veltroni, Bersani, Renzi – through street polling booths, and which continues to evoke the Olive Tree coalition and Prodi, that is, the very leader who in 2005 received formidable popular legitimacy from the primaries, and who on that occasion managed to bring 4,311,149 people to the polls; if primaries are feared, it is not because they are dangerous, but because they are like a mirror reflecting the limitations, the problems and the unresolved shortcomings of a coalition. 

A mechanism capable of enabling more than four million people to choose a leader is not the problem with progressive democracy: it is one of the few things that such a democracy has managed to get right. If primaries cannot be held, as Piccolo suggests, because the coalition is too divided on foreign policy, lacks bite on security and has a fragile political platform, the problem is not the primaries themselves – which, like the receding tide, reveal the seabed of politics – but the fragile foundations upon which the coalition was built.

Can we be divided over Ukraine? Can we be divided over defence? Can we be divided over security? Can we lack credibility on immigration? The policy of burying one’s head in the sand may allow us to make fools of ourselves, but it is unlikely to help prevent progressive voters – faced with a coalition that, day after day, is revealed to be weak, fragile, divided and lacking in credibility – from seeing a coalition which, rather than tackling its problems head-on, seeks a way to sidestep them and avoid asking itself the necessary questions in public. Are there alternatives to these leaders? Are there alternatives to these power balances? Are there alternatives to these ideas? Are there ways to strive to be not less competitive but more innovative?

Having a viable alternative would not only be important for the centre-left, to secure a more glorious future than it would have without attempting to resolve its own problems, but it would also be important for the centre-right, which, faced with a coalition that is not very competitive, can afford to simply manage the status quo without any imagination; whereas, faced with a coalition capable of competing, it would in turn have a duty to innovate, to challenge entrenched interests, to move beyond the status quo and to look to the future in a creative rather than a conservative way. It is precisely the fear of holding primaries that justifies the need to hold them. If leaders are considered weak, a way must be found to make them accountable. And to seek out new faces, there is no need to devise a programme first and then choose a leader, as if the leader were an actor simply called upon to recite a script already written by others. Leadership is, in itself, a programme: it means choosing priorities, hierarchies, compromises, messages, a foreign policy, an economic policy and a security policy. Primaries also serve to decide which script to write and what vision for a coalition to offer the country. We need to seek out a figure capable of representing the coalition in an innovative way, with a bit of blood and a bit of shit, as Rino Formica would have put it, but with the certainty that with primaries there is a slightly better chance of winning an election, whilst without them there is a slightly greater chance of losing it. It is precisely this fear of primaries that demonstrates why they are necessary. If there is a better alternative, it must be given the chance to emerge. The problem is not the mirror. The problem is what the mirror reflects – and which a section of the centre-left would prefer not to see. Long live the primaries.