The Italian Democratic Party proposes itself as the last dike "against the worst right"

The Italian Democratic Party has everything against it.

The polls, the electoral law, the wear and tear after so many technical governments in which she has assumed the role of main beam.

The candidate, Enrico Letta, retired from politics in 2015 to teach in Paris (after his own party brought down his government) and had to return in a hurry, a year ago, to assume the leadership of a formation in trouble.

Letta was proposed at the end of the campaign as the only dike "against the worst right" and as a defender of the Constitution.

On Thursday, the tenors of the coalition that unites the entire right appeared in the Roman Piazza del Popolo.

This Friday, the Democratic Party closed its campaign in the same square and, more or less, perhaps less than more, before a similar number of attendees.

A short distance away, in Piazza Santi Apostoli, Giuseppe Conte's 5-Star Movement ended its campaign.

On the other side of the river, in Garibaldi Square, the Third Pole of Matteo Renzi, the man who was secretary general of the Democratic Party and brought down the Letta government (2013-2015), was holding its final rally.

To close the circle, the communists who refused to join what is now called the PD (and today are Vladimir Putin enthusiasts) gathered in the Santa Maria del Soccorso square.

Voters often punish division.

Italian electoral law penalizes it even more severely.

Letta, we said, faces a very difficult mission.

In his speech, the candidate spoke of a “comeback” (a bad sign: according to some polls, even the 5-Star Movement is on the heels of the PD) and of “unity” (presuming what it lacked).

Enrico Letta is a moderate, reasonably honest man with a long political career since his beginnings in the old Christian Democracy.

But he is not overflowing with charisma.

Perhaps for this reason, the final rally of the left tried to be choral.

A long series of personalities chained brief speeches (“two minutes, comrades, maximum two minutes”, the presenter insisted), punctuated by messages of support from foreign leaders, such as that of Pedro Sánchez.

The final burst corresponded to Letta, who, with a slow tone, defined the PD as "the party of Europe, of the Constitution born of anti-fascism, of public health for all", as opposed to "a denier right [of the covid and climate change] and retrograde” which, as Georgia Meloni herself announced the day before, wants to make a constitutional reform that leads to a French-type presidential Republic.

The candidate of the very moderate left who embodies the PD did not go further and did not talk about whether or not the great favorite, Georgia Meloni, was or was not a neo-fascist, post-fascist or plain fascist.

Previous speakers had spoken of her, without attacking her in depth, and of Silvio Berlusconi, for her delirious tirade in favor of Vladimir Putin that he had launched the day before.

Overall, it was a lukewarm act, even though the attendees experienced a few seconds of enthusiasm singing the “

” ​​of the partisans.

A certain conformism was perceived in the face of the possibility of a defeat, which the latest polls (forbidden publication in Italy) would tend to confirm.

"Perhaps remaining in the opposition is not a great misfortune, whoever forms a government is going to face a terrible winter due to energy shortages and will have to take unpopular measures," opined several thirtysomethings in suits and ties.

“I fear that in the best case we will lose and, in the worst, we will take a tremendous hit,” confessed Annamaria, a woman in her 70s who used to vote for the Socialists when she was young.

The most militant, on the other hand, spoke like Letta of "comeback", spoke of the "help" that rival Silvio Berlusconi gave them with his "idiocies" and assured that, at the last moment, many who thought to vote for 5 Stars or even the centrists of the Third Pole would change their ballot in favor of the PD: "We are the only ones who can stop the Brothers of Italy, we represent the only useful vote and the people know it."

Perhaps.

In elections there is room for the unforeseen.

But in an electoral system like the Italian one, big surprises are unlikely.

It is not a secret that in some corners of the PD the knives are already being sharpened in order, in the event of an electoral disaster, to finish off Letta for the second time.

"We are positive, in this campaign we have sown for the future and we have returned to placing work at the center of our program," said Letta from the podium.

Sitting on a marble pylon, an elderly man held a sign: “Born under Mussolini, I don't want to die under Meloni.

God help us".

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