Time.news – The Pd deputies have chosen Debora Serracchiani as a new group leader in the House. 66 gave it the preference, 24 voted for Marianna Sideboard, a deputy for Barbara Pollastrini, one card was blank and another was blank. No unanimity, but real competition as Serracchiani herself recognized after the election.
“That there has been competition in the group is certainly a novelty, but it is also a positive fact. We have a compact group and it has been compact in the most complex decisions of this legislature and I am convinced that it will be now “, explained the new president of the deputies, putting aside the tensions that crossed the party in the hours preceding the vote, with Serracchiani and Madia to confront with strokes of letters.
The last remote exchange
The last exchange had arrived in the morning, when Madia wrote down the reasons for his perplexity about how the work to get to this vote has developed and Serracchiani who pointed out the points of ‘his’ program for the group.
An open confrontation resulting from the secretary’s request to have two women at the top of a party “deeply encrusted with machismo”, as Letta himself admits.
A choice accepted, at least publicly, by favorable choirs, were it not for the fact that the secretary confesses that he had to “fighting in these ten days against the criticisms of white males, in their fifties, who said: but how, two women even if it is?”.
Letta does not name candidates, does not intervene in the long dispute over the replacement at the top of the parliamentary groups. Until a few hours before his decision to run as a candidate for the dem secretariat, it seemed impossible to touch the pattern that had been created almost three years earlier, after the 2018 political elections and the arrival in parliament of the elected representatives with the lists drawn up by Matteo Renzi .
The new majority of the organs of the Democratic Party arrived to support Nicola Zingaretti could cause a short circuit in the party, avoided only by resorting to the collegial management imposed by the governor of Lazio. Until the birth of the Draghi government, when the currents broke the Gypsy pax and the secretary resigned.
Letta’s bet on women
How to get away from the current logic, then? Letta focuses on women, above all because it is a necessary step for a Democratic Party that wants to play a leading role in the panorama of European progressives, where the issue of gender equality has already had its citizenship for years.
“The theme of women is a deeply encrusted theme that needs a shock cure,” says the dem leader. Yet the currents return to talk about themselves. They do so precisely when the road seems to be heading towards that “positive competition”, free from the spasmodic search for unanimity, evoked by Letta.
On the name of Serracchiani, they say in the Chamber, there was one welding between several currents and, in particular, between that of Base Riformista, led by Lorenzo Guerini and Luca Lotti, and that of Areadem which looks to Dario Franceschini.
“Political parties are the tool that selects the ruling class and proposes solutions to the voters”, says Letta when asked about it by Milena Gabbanelli: “In all this, however, there is the political responsibility of those who lead and who must reward talent and not current affiliations. Differences of thought are legitimate, but it is wrong for the organization of currents to become sclerotic and occupy all the spaces of the party “.
“The current instrument of partition”
Concepts that also return in the long letter-intervention that Marianna Madia sends to fellow deputies: “When the currents are the places of autonomy and the elaboration and promotion of a political line, they make sense, when they are reduced to means of dividing places they become only a unconditional reflex, one of the reasons for the weakening of our political proposal. We are so exposed on this issue that it has already become the subject of political satire by our people “.
The intervention of the currents – together with the accusation of “masked co-optation” made by Madia against Graziano Delrio and decisively rejected by this – caused the internal clash to explode. A situation so tense as to push the treasurer Walter Verini to appeal to the two candidates to reject the agreements and, if these were already concluded, they would not recognize them.
So tense as to suggest the possibility of a draw that would avoid voting in the assembly. The secretary rejects the hypothesis and clearly says that “within the Parliament it is right that the election rule applies”, also because Madia and Serracchiani “are both good, after which individual parliamentarians are right that they have a preference for one or the other.
The satisfaction of the secretary
“Normally all the top organs of Parliament are elected by secret ballot, it is part of the freedom of parliamentarians”. The satisfaction of the secretary Letta is entrusted to a Tweet: “After today’s vote I will be happy to work together with Debora Seracchiani and Simona Malpezzi. Two determined, quality and competent women. We will be a great team. Look ahead “.
Now, as Madia says leaving the Berlinguer room, seat of the Pd group in the Chamber, there is “build together, because this is a parliamentary group. “And the accent, to listen to Madia, seems to fall on that ‘one’, with the meaning of unique, against the split party of political areas.
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