What happens (again) between Letta and Renzi. Damato’s Scratches
That Enrico Letta, having returned from Paris where he had retired due to Matteo Renzi, had not forgotten at all the wrong he suffered seven years earlier with the substantial dismissal as Prime Minister and had very little desire to join again as secretary of the Democratic Party relations with him, it was immediately understood. And proof of this had been given by the calendar of obligatory meetings of Nicola Zingaretti’s successor to the Nazarene with the interlocutors of the government majority.
Renzi had finished in last place: the very last, well after Giuseppe Conte fresh from half verbal or intimistic designation, as president of the 5 Star Movement, and still proud of the qualification of “point of reference for progressives” conferred on him by the predecessor of Enrico Letta, that is Nicola Zingaretti, when the Apulian professor and lawyer seemed firmly in the Palazzo Chigi. He even seemed capable of escaping Renzi’s threats of crisis – always him – by weaving the web of his third government in three years.
Fortunately, on the other hand, Renzi himself had given Enrico Letta reasons and opportunities for a long-distance relationship by leaving the Democratic Party, in the late summer of 2019, well before Nicola Zingaretti got tired of his experience at the Nazarene and even ran away from it. away denouncing the poisoned climate that one breathed there. Renzi had set up on his own with a small but numerically decisive party in the Senate to keep the second Conte government standing or hanging. A small party, I said, but almost openly a privateer, barely held back, or forced to slow down its raids, when the pandemic that had arisen somehow had enveloped the then Prime Minister in an emergency, extraordinary nature and so on. But let alone if Renzi, with that temperament he has, could hold back that much.
Forced by the moods, to say the least, of the parliamentary groups, of which he managed to change the presidents but certainly not the composition, which remained the one derived from the candidacies desired in 2018 by the then party secretary Renzi, also himself, Enrico Letta has openly worked until the day before yesterday, so to speak, for the construction of a “wide” center-left, translated by someone in a new edition of the Olive tree, extended by Renzi to Bersani, another former secretary of the Democratic Party who left the Nazarene. And he worked on it ignoring, or pretending to ignore, the foreclosure of Renzi, and also of Carlo Calenda, declared by Conte. Which is no longer what Nicola Zingaretti imagined at the head of a progressive camp, and formally at the helm of an electorally shabby movement and now in a chronic identity crisis,
Perhaps already resigned in his heart to put up with Renzi, as well as Calenda, because he is aware of having a bargaining power lower than that proclaimed in public, and which in the end not even many grillini believe very much, Conte has seen himself almost surpassed in anti-irenzism by Enrico Letta after the injury of the secretary of the Democratic Party in the Senate in the clash with the center-right on the bill by Piddino Alessandro Zan against homotransphobia, already approved by the House. With Renzi never again, Enrico Letta practically shouted and swore, attributing to him, behind the curtain of a usually well-paid race in Saudi Arabia, the direction of the stop imposed on the provision by secret ballot. And who knows what other games, starting with the increasingly close and tangled game of the Quirinale.
Renzi, for his part, did not miss the opportunity to carry out a half-political trial for Letta, this time in public, like the one in 2013, speaking on the phone with the general of the Guardia di Finanza Michele Adinolfi, who did not know he was being intercepted for an investigation. On that occasion Renzi said of Letta Prime Minister that he was not suitable to stay in his place, where in fact he would soon replace him: perhaps, he would be more suitable for the Quirinale, he added knowing full well that he was sitting there at the time. all quiet Giorgio Napolitano, confirmed only a few months ago, and that Letta was not even the age to aspire to it shortly, still being 47 years old, against the 50 required by the Constitution.
Tall and strong, however, the warning of a man not suspected of collusion with Renzi was raised from the Democratic Party: the former leader of the Senate Luigi Zanda. According to which “it is not from the outcome of a certainly serious secret ballot on the Zan bill that the Democratic Party must elaborate its alliance policy”. This is not how “the perimeter of the center left” must be defined, also because “we should resign ourselves to remaining in the minority in the Senate from here until the end of the legislature”. Unless Enrico Letta is maturing under an early election project. But this Zanda didn’t suspect it, Or, at least, he didn’t say it.
