Renzi’s camp challenges Conte and calls on Occhiuto

Florence, from our correspondent. Ulysses had his bow and Renzi has his toaster – the hero’s grill, as he sings and recounts by the fire how one remains Renzi: ‘I endured and remained’. He plays the ‘Toaster’ for Conte, Calenda, Tajani and Meloni, “who, if he loses, goes home, but if he wins, takes it all: the Quirinale”. Giorgetti is also getting a roasting; Renzi complains that he “gets his sums wrong and must stop sticking his nose into the banking game. What he did with Unicredit was despicable”. The Leopolda is also under fire – the fourteenth edition, the celebration of the return to Ithaca – in this Florence that is still the ‘Renzi School of Stratagems’, the ‘believe in it and stand for election’ without any guarantees, the insurance policy that, for Clint Eastwood, you only ask for when buying a toaster. He refers to himself as ‘Kraken’ and even sells a T-shirt featuring the giant squid (for 20 euros), yet this latest iteration of Renzi evokes Hector, the defeated victor who replies to Achilles – and to the many Contes who do not wish him well – saying: ‘I shall flee no more from you; my heart compels me’. It feels as though we are hearing him beneath the walls of Troy, ablaze, the broad camp, when, together with his Deiphobus, the group leaders Boschi and Paita – the latter acclaimed for her bold skirt – he defies the gods and the odds for that romantic dream: “I appeal to the reformists of Forza Italia: come along.” It is the most intimate Leopolda yet, but perhaps the youngest ever seen – a small trireme of fresh-faced newcomers who do not desert their post and who, at Renzi’s call – “Ukraine is not for sale; Ukraine must be defended” – rise to their feet. The suitors are Salvini and Trump, whilst the unity of the centre-left is the harbour, Nausicaa’s caress.

Anyone over thirty feels a bit like Eumaeus, Odysseus’s loyal servant, and not just because the set design – with the rudder and the remains of a ship – brings to mind the Phaeacians and Penelope. The Leopolda is perhaps the only left-wing party conference where people still smile and mimic Renzi, who, in turn, mimics Berlusconi. A young man calls him ‘president’ and Renzi teases him like an older brother: ‘I’ve always dreamt of staying the same old arsehole, and you treat me like a revered master’.

It is the aftermath of the aftermath; it is the wisdom of being on the fringes of the broad political spectrum, whilst retaining ‘multifaceted ingenuity’ – which is nothing other than that flash of insight that pulls you out of the stormy sea. Renzi, too, cultivates Meloni’s longevity, but unlike Meloni, his is the roguish sort, that of Henry Kissinger (as Francesco Merlo writes in his Tutto Qui, published by Solferino), who relied on the handrail on the stairs – the handrail that prevents you from falling, from disappearing. Renzi’s handrail is risk-taking: Pietro Bartolo’s reckless candidacy for President of the Region of Sicily, the doctor from Lampedusa who, like Chatwin, asks himself, ‘But what am I doing here?’. And it is always this risk-taking that keeps Renzi below four per cent, yet well above the entire parliamentary spectrum – Italy’s sea of mediocrity. I realise that in the audience there is no mention of Conte, who is the Charybdis of the Leopolda – that Conte who, on Friday evening, asked Schlein to act as Renzi’s guardian, his guarantor. Benedetto Della Vedova says: “Believe me, even Conte is getting on in years and won’t break the alliance.” I ask him if it’s true that he’s working for Roberto Gualtieri as a unifying figure, the ‘third man’, and Della Vedova tells me that “yes, he might”, because Gualtieri “doesn’t rile anyone”. No one here has any faith in the primaries, even though everyone claims they will go ahead. Stefano Bonaccini doesn’t believe in them either; had he been the Bonaccini of this Leopolda, he might well have beaten Schlein. He is the last to speak, before Renzi, but the first to call for “let’s do away with the word ‘primaries’”. It had been since Minniti’s time that a leading figure in the PD had uttered the words spoken by Bonaccini, who is also the party’s president: “I urge you not to be afraid of repression, as Franco Gabrielli says. Citizenship must be granted to those who deserve it, but as for those who commit crimes, let’s be clear: either we put them behind bars or they’re out on the street.”

Their numbers have dwindled, and that is no bad thing (Salvini should take note), but they know how to embody the role once played by the Republican Party, Italia Viva, and also ‘Forza Garantismo’: foreign policy, imagination, provocation. In the room stands the ‘Tajanometer’ – a cardboard cut-out of Tajani dressed as Granny Felicita – with the levels of modesty: scandalous, too daring, measured, reliable, marriage material (the skirt reaching down to her tights). I meet Tommaso Nannicini, the economist from the Renzi government, who came up with the idea of scrapping road tax before Meloni did, and Nannicini, too, thinks that ‘involving state-owned companies and lowering fuel prices was a brilliant move by Meloni’. They are beginning to fear that Meloni and her government cannot be defeated by Bartolo’s humanity and indignation – a humanity that brings tears to the eyes, that age-old pain of his which makes him say, addressing the ministers and Meloni’s team: “Sleazy, fascist characters”. Mayors and Mastella-aligned regional councillors take turns on stage, opening with “I bring you greetings from Clemente”. Luciano Nobili’s sheer audacity stands out as he gives Conte a telling-off: “He’s asking us for guarantees, yet as Prime Minister he made no distinction between the rule of law and punitive justice.”

It is the third and final day, and it is already clearly a round-up of the best moments, a time for taking stock: “Vincenzo De Luca was exceptional”; “Fedez went over the top about Liliana Segre but Renzi stood his ground” and there is approval for Matteo Hallisey, the spotty radical who imagines a world of free beaches. Matteo Bassetti, the virologist and trade unionist representing a sector we used to revere in times of hardship but which we now put on trial through committees, was also invited. It is a parade of cheerful faces, like that of Gigi De Palo, former president of the Forum delle Famiglie. Two years ago, he was rebuked by Meloni for failing to defend Minister Roccella against attacks by students, and today he is here to argue: “It is not a question of convincing Italians to have children. Having children today is, unfortunately, a cause of poverty. Yet Italians would like to have them.”

It’s true, there are fewer and fewer of us and, as Brecht would say, our strength is waning, but as the tenacious Gian Domenico Caiazza proclaims: “We defend values that are difficult to make people understand; they are values understood by a minority”. These are the values of the former mayor of Lodi, Uggetti, another man thrown into prison far too easily, who still gets moved by the ‘Internationale’, but who acknowledges Renzi’s fine battle, the struggle in the style of Ettore, ‘when one cannot catch up and the other cannot escape’. It is undoubtedly the station (Leopolda), the stop that Enzo Tortora would have dreamt of, the platform of Francesca Nanni, the Milan public prosecutor who had the courage to reopen the Zuncheddu case – she too is a guest here, another brave soul on board the ship.

Fourteen years have passed since the first Leopolda, and the discussion continues to revolve around Renzi, who proposes a ‘German-style contract’, three guarantees for Conte because ‘the things that unite us are more than those that divide us’, ‘I want a guarantee that “Salvini no longer goes to the Ministry of the Interior, Giorgetti to the Council of Ministers, and that a pro-European goes to the Quirinale, not an amateur or someone from the secret services”. And again: “No more Trump”. He still possesses a certain something, even if he has whitewashed it somewhat; he has the shortcut (“TV is full of Bocchino-land”) and he also has the ruthlessness to strike at his neighbours in the centre, such as Alessandro Onorato, who in Sicily let himself be dazzled by hyenas and leopards – former proponents of the (non-)negotiation between the state and the Mafia (“I won’t form the centre with people like Ingroia”). He remains the Renzi of the ‘knight’s move’ when he proposes the ‘ship of the guarantors’, appealing to Zangrillo and Occhiuto, the president of the Calabria region, who, however, turns the invitation on its head: “Dear Renzi, perhaps you should be the one asking yourself what you’re doing in there. I’d like to see Renzi, Boschi, Calenda and Marattin in the centre-right; there’s room there for the ideas they’ve believed in”. Renzi thinks that “the election will be held in November”, whilst Bonaccini wonders: “What needs to happen for us to unite and send them packing?”. However, they are unable to end this centrist war with that ‘zero point something’ in Elena’s place, and they continue to discuss platforms that are as fleeting as the winds of Aeolus. Renzi, who wants ‘a serious foreign policy’, cannot achieve this, nor can Calenda, who suggests to Renzi ‘not to ramble on and to go to Kyiv’. They will continue to dislike one another, just as Renzi once again seeks a ploy: Vannacci, breaking up Forza Italia, a German-style contract… It is not Ithaca that awaits them, but Meloni, eager to set fire to their ships – the woman who, like Achilles, ‘hides a heart of iron within her breast’.