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Abstract
Matteo Renzi's rise to the leadership of the Democratic Party brings to the heart of the centre-left the leadership model imposed upon the Italian scene by Berlusconi in the early 1990s. A post-ideological, anti-political and innovative type of leadership, which has proved to be highly effective in attracting electoral support and media attention. Yet a type of leadership that clashes with the cultural and organisational roots of the centre-left. The article frames the experience of the new party Secretary, focusing on his political history, public narrative and style of communication.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Ipsos and Demos & Pi, for having provided the data used in the article, and the journal editors, Anna Bosco and Susannah Verney, for their comments and help.
Notes
1. The current Italian regulations do not, in reality, provide for the direct election of the head of government, although the electoral law in effect since 2005 (and declared by the Constitutional Court, in December 2013, unconstitutional in some of its parts) obliges every political force (be it a party or a coalition) to present itself at the elections with a leader.
2. For a reconstruction of the ‘history’ of the primaries in Italy, and of the different meanings attributed to the term in the scientific field and in public debate, see Corbetta and Vignati (Citation2013). At a national level, there have been five primaries to date: two coalition primaries for the choice of the centre-left candidate for the premiership in 2005 (Romano Prodi) and 2012 (Pier Luigi Bersani); and three party primaries for the choice of the Secretary General of the PD, in 2007 (Walter Veltroni), 2009 (Pier Luigi Bersani) and 2013 (Matteo Renzi).
3. Bersani was elected Secretary of the PD in October 2009, after a brief interval during which the party was led by Dario Franceschini.
4. The mechanism comprised three main steps: (1) the meeting of party members (designed to select the National Convention delegates) called to elect three candidates for the primaries; (2) the open primaries, for the selection of the Secretary and the members of the National Assembly; and (3) in the event that none of the candidates gained an absolute majority, a second ballot vote by the National Assembly.
5. The M5S was the first party in terms of votes cast in Italy; the PD came first if the votes of Italians living abroad are included.
6. The expression ‘red belt’ applies to the central regions of Italy (Emilia Romagna, Tuscany, Marche and Umbria), which are characterised by a strong left-wing tradition (Ramella 2005).
7. Renzi's ideas on the reform of Italy's labour market were developed, in the first weeks after the 2013 PD primaries, in the so-called Jobs Act proposed by the new Secretary General (Financial Times Citation2014).
8. Renzi married at 24 and had three children by the time he became mayor.
9. Renzi had indeed once worked in the marketing sector, in a firm owned by his family.
10. The most prominent examples are Giuseppe Civati, regional councillor of the Lombardy region, and Debora Serracchiani, Member of the European Parliament and Secretary of the PD in the province of Udine (now president of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region).
11. SEL was founded in 2009 by Vendola, President of the Puglia region and ex-representative of the PCI and Rifondazione comunista (Communist Refoundation Party).
12. Following the primaries, Tabacci and other centrist politicians founded the Centro democratico (Democratic Centre), one of the PD's allies in the 2013 general election.
13. These citations are taken from public speeches made by Bersani at the V Festa Democratica (Reggio Emilia, 9 September 2012) and at the opening of the PD 2013 electoral campaign (Rome, 17 January 2013).
14. A second debate between Bersani and Renzi took place before the second round, on Rai1, the main public television channel.
15. The Secretary himself has often countered the idea of ‘scrapping’ with that of ‘safe used’ – an expression used in the automobile market to indicate certified pre-owned cars.
16. Enrico Letta was already Minister for Community Politics in 1998, at the age of 32 (first D'Alema Government).
17. The other two candidates were Giuseppe Civati, formerly Renzi's partner in the movement of ‘scrappers’ (see note 10), and Gianni Pittella, Vice-President of the European Parliament.
18. Specifically, it was 2,814,881. In the two previous PD party primaries, turnout was 3,554,169 in 2007 and 3,102,709 in 2009.
19. It should be recalled, in this regard, that many of Berlusconi's detractors maintain that his political fortunes were ‘prepared’ by a cultural transformation of Italian society brought about by the advent of privately owned television (in Italy the ‘invention’ of Berlusconi).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fabio Bordignon
Fabio Bordignon teaches Methodology of Political and Social Research at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. His main areas of research are electoral behaviour and the personalisation of politics. He is the author of Il Partito del capo. Da Berlusconi a Renzi (2013) and L'Europa unita … dall'antipolitica (2009); and with Ilvo Diamanti and Luigi Ceccarini he edited Un salto nel voto. Ritratto politico dell'Italia di oggi (2013).