Democratic hope

The Italian opposition is rudderless, after Walter Veltroni quit as leader of the centre-left Democratic Party. When they lost the general election last April to Silvio Berlusconi's coalition of the People of Freedom and the Northern League, this blog counciled patience for the Democrats, arguing that they should invest time in forging a coherent centre-left identity and seek to exploit the inherent weaknesses of the governing coalition. But following a string of regional election set-backs and corruption scandals, Veltroni leaves the party in danger of unravelling, disorientated by the economic crisis, the resiliance of the Berlusconi government and its own failure to formulate and project a credible image.

It would be gravely disappointing if the Democratic Party, formed in October 2007 out of the two then-largest leftist blocs, was to collapse again, or to abandon attempts to stake out the centre ground by instead attempting to recreate the broad leftist coalition of the previous Prodi regime by reaching out to far left groupings ousted from the legislature at the last election. While the last election produced a troublingly xenophobic and populist government, one blessing to emerge was a much simplified political landscape with a greatly reduced number of parties in parliament. Rather than two disparate blocs, each straddling both the Catholic centre and the extremes, it seemed that Italian voters would in future face a clear choice between a pair of major parties, one on the centre-left and one on right, which in turn would make the process of actually elaborating government policy a lot more efficient. Reaching out to the Communists risks returning either to the old incoherent political blocs or a wholesale abandonment of the reformist centre - an alarming development in the midst of an economic slum.

Economic realism need not come at the expense of political success, for forming a credible centrist alternative remains a viable medium term strategy for the Democrats. The Berlusconi regime remains heavily dependent on the charisma of the Prime Minister himself to hold the coalition together and keep up support in the polls, but Mr Berlusconi is almost certainly too old to contest the next election personally, and will instead spend the next few years distracted by his attempts to end his political career in the largely ceremonial Presidency. This desire was in evidence when he deliberately sent the country into constitutional crisis to undermine the current leftist incumbant earlier in the month, when he issued a decree to keep alive an Italian woman who had entered persistent vegetative state 17 years ago which the President then refused to sign. If the Italian public have to face such shenanigans - against the backdrop of a truely dire economy - for the next few years, only an opposition in utter disarray could fail to capitalise. It is up to the Democratic Party to hold themselves together, and hold true to the moderate platform they have largely represented up to now.