Orlando: “We need a new Prodi; primaries are inevitable, but first we need a platform agreed upon from the grassroots up”

“Anyone who wants to put themselves forward, raise your hand,” says former Prime Minister Romano Prodi to the centre-left’s aspiring foreign ‘pope’ candidates, with all due respect to former minister Roberto Speranza, who, at the head of the coalition, would symbolically put forward a partisan or a young lad. “Well, these seem to me to be proposals made in good faith,” says former Democratic Party minister Andrea Orlando, “but who would raise their hand when the leaders of the main parties are already in the running? And let’s be careful not to send out the wrong signals, by appearing to be the sort who base their approach on the outcome of the new electoral law, taking it for granted that the right will succeed in pushing it through and giving up on fighting in the streets.” 

Many in the PD are showing a cool attitude towards the primaries, on which, however, the party’s secretary Elly Schlein and the M5S leader Giuseppe Conte (along with Alessandro Onorato and, who knows, Matteo Renzi and, again, who knows, Nicola Fratoianni or Angelo Bonelli) are adamant. The former minister also warns against naming third parties (such as Silvia Salis): “There is a risk of causing harm to those very names.” As for the timing, however: the idea is that not only must “the policy platform and the agreement of the various centre-left leaders on it” come first, but also the hard work of putting in the effort, both figuratively and literally. Orlando sees, in fact, the need to set out swiftly and “without prejudicial vetoes” towards drafting the programme, and then to tour Italy, fostering “the emergence of a grassroots movement for the Constitution”: “If we look back at the referendum,” he says, “there was a strong desire to play an active role among citizens outside the narrow sphere of politics – people who may previously have abstained or not voted for the left. We should give a voice to those communities too.” Time is running out. “I do, however, see a viable path in putting forward to the public a preliminary draft of the programme drawn up by the political parties, to be supplemented with external feedback”. But who should take charge of these voluntary tours? “All the coalition parties. Together, and not just in Rome”. And what about the primaries? “Another approach could have been to select the leadership based on election results – this is done in many countries and is a method based on a shared convention. But this consensus does not exist. And there is difficulty in finding common ground even on other approaches.” Including on the issue of partisanship. “At the moment, I don’t see any particularly strong proposals that could avoid the path of primaries. But let’s be careful about the signals we send out, as if leadership were the solution to everything. This makes people passive, at a time when institutions carry less weight and there is a need for social mobilisation. Let’s mobilise, I repeat, against this electoral law: it would be a way of engaging with a section of the country we want to reach.”

And yet there is endless talk of a third pope. “Prodi was chosen; he certainly did not put himself forward. The political parties – which at the time had a firm hold on their respective electorates – had decided that a balance could be struck with him. I don’t think we can count on a similar situation today.” The idea of a centre-left alliance also seems to have fallen by the wayside, and perhaps the Renzi–Conte truce too. “If we want to hold primaries, let’s do them properly, based on a policy platform widely agreed upon, so as to minimise the risk of polarisation. Otherwise, the right might as well not even bother campaigning.” Orlando does not want “prejudicial vetoes”, but what about the mistrust between the Five Star Movement and Renzi’s camps? “On the merits of the matter: if we manage to build a truly shared platform, the conditions are in place to keep everyone on board; otherwise, we can explain why some are left out.” Listening to the country, then. Does the rise of the AfD in Germany have anything to do with a failure to listen? Can the left learn a lesson from this? “Today we must bring politics back into society, which does not mean organising massive rallies, but rather bringing a reflection on the country’s future back into factories, schools and offices, especially at a time when the right is capitalising on the fact that changes are happening so rapidly as to leave people feeling adrift – changes often driven by Big Tech groups and major financial centres that support the right itself. At the same time, they capitalise on the rejection these changes provoke, glorifying a tradition that may not even exist, but which is reassuring.” According to Orlando, the vote for the AfD also says something about the issue of rearmament. “I think it has to do with the resentment felt by those who are losing out in the welfare state and believe that funds have been diverted to defence, and with the failure of the Merz government’s gamble: in the face of an industrial crisis, rearmament was treated as an industrial policy. A mistake that should give us all pause for thought, not least in light of the experience of the von der Leyen Commission.”

Conte may well be pleased to hear these words. But on the left, there is no consensus on rearmament and Ukraine. “You cannot expect to disarm it at such a delicate stage,” says Orlando, “but the serious question to ask is: was and is sending weapons the only way to help it? And could the EU not have played a deterrent role in some other way?”