02-Bellucci/Maraffi/Segatti 12/18/01 3:36 PM Page 53 2 THE DEMOCRATS OF THE LEFT Paolo Bellucci, Marco Maraffi, and Paolo Segatti The first Congress of the Democrats of the Left (DS), which took place in Turin 13-16 January 2000, represented another stop in the transformation of the former Italian Communists (PCI). The new leader of the party – Walter Vetroni who followed Achille Occhetto and Massimo D’Alema – tried to change the party’s politics, orga- nization, and culture. He planned these alterations to affirm a new political strategy. With the fall of Prodi’s government in October 1998, and the rise of D’Alema to the presidency of the Council, Veltroni became the new Secretary of the DS. An ardent supporter of the Ulivo (Olive Tree, the Center-Left electoral alliance), Veltroni succeeded the leading proponent of the “social democratic” alternative. Given these differences, Veltroni’s methods of ascent were unexpected. D’Alema named him to lead the party, and the appropriate party organ quickly ratified the nomination. The new Secretary and ex-vice Prime Minister inherited a party renewed in name and in symbol. Above all, he now led a party that, after the General States of the Left of February 1998, had absorbed various fragments of catholic, lay, socialist, and even communist reform into what remained substantially little more than an enlarged PDS.1 Now a powerful electoral force with a weakened organization, party power lay largely in D’Alema’s hands. Given this picture, the new leadership’s call for a Congress sought to accomplish three goals: affirm Veltroni’s leadership; rede- fine the formal rules of the organization, and establish a definitive 02-Bellucci/Maraffi/Segatti 12/18/01 3:36 PM Page 54 54 Paolo Bellucci, Marco Maraffi, and Paolo Segatti post-communist identity, creating a new relationship with other parties of the Left and Center-Left and developing a new position with regard to labour unions in particular, and social and economic modernization in general. Each of these themes divided the party’s internal groups. Each overlapped as well with the conflict between D’Alema and Veltroni, the two most prestigious leaders of the 1990s. These conflicts hovered over the party during the year, from the start in January as they prepared for the Congress to the elec- tion of Massimo D’Alema to the presidency of the party on 15 December 2000. Towards the Congress During the meeting of the directorship on 21 June 1999, Folena, coordinator of the Party Secretariat, proposed to hasten the advances that would precede the Congress. As reported by several journalists, D’Alema agreed with this plan. He preferred either to postpone the Congress or to reduce its range, transforming it into “simple regional assizes.”2 He hoped, thereby, to avoid losing con- trol of the party’s apparatus to the new Secretary. Many of the new leading group’s subsequent actions seem to justify D’Alema’s wor- ries. Veltroni’s project of building a party “autonomous of the gov- ernment” manifested itself as a series of changes of the peripheral leadership. In 1999, five out of nine Secretaries of major cities (Naples, Rome, Bari, Genoa, Bologna) were changed. The change at the level of regional offices involved fifteen regional Secretaries out of twenty. A conflict within the party’s majority, the contest between the “D’Alemians” and “Veltronians,” seemed more bitter than that between the majority and the opposition of the left.3 Other cleavage lines appeared with regard to the definition of the cultural and programmatic identity of the party. At the begin- ning of October 1999, the Congressional documents in which Sec- retary Veltroni called upon the body of the party to explain itself were made public. Numerous directors, including all the DS min- isters, all the regional Secretaries, and the Secretaries of CGIL and UIL union organizations countersigned the motion signed by the Secretary. D’Alema, on the other hand, limited himself to declaring his support of the Secretary’s motion without signing it. Most of the components organized as the Christian Socials (led by Gorrieri and Carniti) or the Reform Association of Europe (directed by the former Secretary of UIL, Benvenuto) also declared themselves to be in favour of the Secretary’s motion. The United Communists, a fac- tion of the DS left which had split in 1995 from the Communist 02-Bellucci/Maraffi/Segatti 12/18/01 3:36 PM Page 55 The Democrats of the Left 55 Refoundation, also backed the document, and so did the “ulivisti” and the inheritors of the reformist component of the old PCI, even if these groups did not formally add their signatures.4 Only the left wing of the New Left party openly opposed the position, offering an alternative motion against the drift of the party toward an indis- tinct “democratic reformism” and, thereby, saving the identity of the DS’s left. The Secretary’s motion was the impetus behind a broad cultural and programmatic manifesto, called “Plan for the Left in 2000.”5 Drawing on discussions at provincial Congresses, a commission chaired by Ruffolo crafted this. It traces guidelines for a new cul- tural and political positioning of the Party of the Oak. We will dis- cuss it in the next paragraph. At the end of the pre-Congressional procedures, Veltroni’s motion obtained the approval of 79.1 percent of votes, voiced at 7,150 foun- dation Congresses, 116 federation Congresses, and 19 regional Con- gresses. 172,303 militants of the DS participated in these assemblies, a number equal to 26.2 percent of all the members. This electoral body represented the 2,195 regional delegates who then participated in the national Congress.6 The party’s majority demon- strated strength across the country, whereas the New Left exceeded their national average of 20.2 percent in Piedmont, Lombardy, and the Veneto in the North, and in Campania and Basilicata in the South, while it was particularly weak in Emilia-Romagna. The debate in the peripheral areas was less ritual-like than usual. With respect to the preceding Congress of February 1997 there were many more widely divergent positions (29.9 percent against 12.7 percent). This was still, however, a minority, and so it is not an exaggeration to observe that most members were far from the party’s internal battles. Furthermore, many members did not understand the terms of the current debates. Indeed, more were dissatisfied than at the previous Congress with regard to informa- tion within the party (54 percent against 48 percent in 1997) and its democratic life (48 percent against 39 percent in 1997).7 Themes of the Congress The first theme was surely separation from a post-communist iden- tity. Veltroni intended the first Congress of the Democrats of the Left to represent the conclusive resting point of a ten-year voyage of redefinition. He wanted to abolish every effective and symbolic tie with its communist past. To reach this end, he assigned an important role to the document Plan for the Left in 2000. This text 02-Bellucci/Maraffi/Segatti 12/18/01 3:36 PM Page 56 56 Paolo Bellucci, Marco Maraffi, and Paolo Segatti declared the purpose of redefining the identity, the values, and the emergence of a “new,” “democratic and reformist” Left. It would replace the “traditional” values of the European social democratic left, which were no longer adequate for social reality. It sought to “connect them with new values to put at the base of its political and governing culture.”8 New themes – feminism, civil rights, envi- ronmentalism, and pacifism— received pride of place. The docu- ment implicitly abandoned the old interpretive schemes of Marxism in the analysis of economic and social relationships. Vel- troni’s reflection on the communist experience was also included in this picture and was synthesized into a strong and explicit affir- mation of its incompatibility with liberty. This was not the first time that the Secretary presented these ideas. For example, in a let- ter to Turin’s La Stampa on 16 October 1999, he affirmed that the twentieth century was a “century of blood,” partly due to “the tragedy of communism and the horrors of Stalinism.” On the other hand, this valuation did not imply a complete break with the PCI’s history. Rather, Veltroni acknowledged that in the party’s history there were tragic pages, in particular that of the “support of Stalin- ism and the support of the intervention in Hungary.” In the opening discourse of the Congress, Veltroni returned to these themes, naming the liberal-socialist thought of Carlo Rosselli, among other things, as a new cultural symbol of the party and openly distancing himself from Togliatti’s harsh condemnation of this idealist tradition in the 1950s. Veltroni maintained: One cannot not remember the words, immersed in the bitterness of the political and ideological conflict of those terrible years, with which Palmiro Togliatti called Carlo Rosselli a ‘worthless dilettante, without any serious theoretical formation’ and his book Socialismo Liberale a ‘mediocre slander that aligns itself directly with fascist political litera- ture.’ The defeat of these ideas and the movements that represented them had an unsurpassed influence on the character of the left in Italy. Now is the time to say clearly that the reform left, the left of the liberal socialism of 2000, is our political identity. […] Of democratic liberalism we have made ours, irreversibly, the culture of human rights, the universal value of democracy, the centrality of the theme of liberty, regard for the individual, the value of inclusion, the acceptance without reserve of a market economy, the valuing of competition and even of conflict, together with the importance of rules, of procedures, of formalities.