Conte-Schlein: the hilarious paradox of the broad coalition

A remarkable political phenomenon. I will elect you, but I will treat you like a puppet and replace you when the time is right. Conte, leader of a minor and fragmented faction within the ‘possible centre-left alliance’, is gathering momentum, stirring things up, huffing and puffing, and gaining a clear lead – not just in the polls – over his rival for the premiership, the secretary of the alliance’s largest party, known as the ‘broad coalition’. The master of political anonymity—who became a statesman at the helm of two governments and then a party leader—would call his protégé to order and win back the power lottery (in opposition, at least). In fact, Schlein—in a paradoxical twist—was elected not by her party’s grassroots but by an external electorate hostile to the historical factions of the Democrats, an electorate composed in particular of the Five Star Movement and Contian-aligned voters, all of whom have historically been hostile to the militant pro-Ukraine stance of the PD’s reformists and centrists.

Faced with the demagogic, pacifist blackmail ‘against rearmament’ – an easy and resonant slogan brandished by the Five Star Movement at their pre-election congress as a banner for the battle within the coalition, the PD leader risks taking a beating in the primaries and, in the meantime, finds herself destabilised, surrounded by hostile manoeuvres of various kinds, and undermined by genuine faction leaders and old-guard stalwarts. Elected by the Five Star Movement to keep in check an old, rusty but experienced party apparatus, and to make a show of it, she would now find that mandate effectively withdrawn, after many years in a sticky role – prominent but ineffective – in the opposition.

It may be that, in the end, the PD manages to turn Conte’s own unpredictability and cunning arrogance against him and his supporters, establishing a ‘Kyiv or death’ line that leaves little scope for the suggestive and sly use of the most cross-party form of Putinism combined with the most primitive form of pacifism, and threatening a split capable of bringing the Five Star Movement’s claims back to reason. However, it is a difficult slope to climb back up, at least in that direction. For now, Conte is the candidate of the prevailing left-wing public opinion, even within the PD, a manoeuvre that appears to have been entirely successful. Schlein’s PD, on the other hand, is a party heading towards the carnivals of desertion and retreat preached by its young assembly members, and the follies of a flimsy interpretation of Article 11 of the Constitution as authorisation for the white flag of democracies against autocracies. This is surprising for a Constitution whose foundations were laid on 25 April 1945 at the end of a phase of fratricidal yet heroic war, marked by anti-fascism. With Schlein’s election, it has become clear that into that ordinary oil lamp that is the PD—in revolt against its own original identity, the lamp of Aladdin from One Thousand and One Nights—a genie has entered: the Five Star Movement’s genie of the most unbridled demagoguery. The party, for what it’s worth, was ideologically hijacked by its secretary’s voters, and now the genie of the lamp has emerged from hiding and is asking its master what wishes it must grant.