At the end of a Saturday-morning town hall meeting in the northern Italian municipality of Cavriago, residents linger by the central piazza gesturing, clamouring and soothing their pain with cigarettes and wine. The topic is politics, and their affliction is the implosion of the ruling centre-left Democratic Party. “It’s hard to understand what happened,” Vincenzo Delmonte says, with a bewildered stare. “One day everything is going fine, and the following morning the left’s big guys walk out of the party, calling for a split. Why? This is madness.”
The Democratic Party is a 2007 experiment that merged Christian Democrats and post-communists under one leadership. It worked locally but the two factions grew increasingly wary of each other on the national stage. Distrust brought compromise; compromise led to quarrels. Then Matteo Renzi, the former party secretary and Italian prime minister until December 2016, exacerbated the tensions by triggering a leadership election.
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