“They’ll go ahead, but they no longer make sense today. There are too many differences between the PD and the 5S.” Salvatore Vassallo speaks

The “father of the primaries” believes that primaries have lost their historical purpose. “They were conceived for political forces that share fundamental values. But now they may no longer make sense,” Salvatore Vassallo tells Il Foglio. He is the man who helped make primaries a defining feature of the PD, having played a part in drafting its founding constitution. Today, far from the parliamentary benches and closer to his professorial chair, while recognising the value of this mechanism imported from across the Atlantic, he finds it difficult to assert that it is useful for selecting a leader for the current centre-left. “To have a definitive answer, we would need to understand whether Giuseppe Conte’s positions on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are dictated by electoral opportunism or not,” says the political scientist. The most plausible hypothesis at the moment, in his view, is that they will go ahead. Unlike other members of the Democratic Party, he finds interesting elements in Speranza’s idea of putting forward either an 18-year-old or an elderly partisan as prime ministerial candidate. For Vassallo, “the argument has some merit”.

Tensions surrounding the primaries date back more than twenty years. “It all began with the Apulian primaries on 16 January 2005, when it became clear that they could be not merely a ritual of participation and support for the leader-in-waiting, but also genuinely competitive, capable of producing unexpected results,” says Vassallo. They served three purposes: “To give voters the opportunity to express dissent towards the government in office and support for the centre-left; secondly, to enable them to choose the coalition’s leadership; and finally, to allow voters from smaller constituent parties to feel more fully part of the coalition.” The debate then intensified, “partly by bringing to the surface disagreements that had already become apparent during the coalition’s formation”. The main criticisms came from the Dalemian wing of the PD and from the post-Christian Democrat factions within La Margherita. “They saw the systematic use of this method as a loss of control, but also as the possibility that eccentric figures might come into play,” explains the political scientist. “All this led to amendments to the party constitution, to make it more difficult to hold primaries or easier to avoid them.” Twenty-one years on, opinions within the PD continue to differ. Both Schlein and the reformists want primaries (“though they would have preferred the alternative to Conte to have a different profile”, says Vassallo), whilst an opposing camp is gaining ground interview by interview, culminating in Speranza’s proposal: an 18-year-old or a partisan as the third candidate.

For long-standing Democratic Party figures such as Arturo Parisi, this idea “has caused anger”. Vassallo sees more to it. “What he says has a certain plausibility to it, namely that more votes are lost on the M5S side if the coalition’s sole candidate is Schlein than are lost on the PD side if the candidate is Conte. And it is an argument,” the political scientist reasons, “that holds water from an empirical point of view”. From this, there are two ways to interpret his proposal: “Either we hand the leadership to Conte in advance, or, as we are opposed to nominating a prime ministerial candidate, we put forward an unknown candidate. At that point, to choose the prime minister, either we do as the centre-right did in 2022 (the party with the most votes nominates the prime minister) or we tell the voters: ‘We’ll let you know later’”. Behind this line of reasoning, however, some doubts remain. “It contradicts what various figures on the centre-left have said and done over the last twenty years, hailing primaries for their ability to produce a candidate before the elections,” says Vassallo. “And besides, it might not be very workable. Conte, who is very popular, wants to be nominated before the elections and can only achieve this through primaries. And Schlein won’t back down.” He does not speculate on who will emerge victorious. But he is certain of one thing: “The ‘broad coalition’ theory persistently promoted by the PD was initially supported on the assumption that the other allies would, in any case, be minor partners. However, today the electorates are comparable, and there is a certain degree of mutual mistrust between them on key issues. If Conte’s stance on Kyiv were not merely rhetoric but a sign of a deep rift on fundamental issues, the primaries would no longer make sense within the broad coalition”.