Forza Italia is fed up with Meloni and Salvini: the centrist tests with Renzi and Calenda begin

“We are ready for early elections. The game is already open” : the secretary of the Democratic Party, from Trento, launches her challenge and these are not words spent at random. Elly Schlein senses the creaking in the right’s stability after two years without any problems whatsoever. She knows how important European legitimacy was for Giorgia Meloni ’s stability and she sees with unconcealed satisfaction that legitimacy falter more and more every day after the Italian right-wing leader’s imbalance in favor of Donald Trump. She aims to beat her rival at her own game: that of consensus.

If the left, with Silvia Salis , wrests Genoa from Giorgia's coalition on Sunday, the effect, even on a psychological level, will be very strong. Reaching the quorum in the referendums of June 8 and 9 remains a very difficult task but a high turnout, between 35 and 40%, would constitute a political success. The regional elections next autumn promise to end with an almost overwhelming victory for the centre-left and a result of that kind, if confirmed, could also boost the confirmatory referendum on justice reform, where there will be no quorum shield. The right, with the ball still, remains very strong and probably the secretary herself knows it perfectly well, although polls should always be taken with a pinch of salt and especially in a phase of continuous and very fast upheavals like this one. But it is not a given that the balls will remain still. FI's discomfort in the face not only of the increasingly radical positions of the League but also of the "Trumpian" slide of the prime minister and FdI is evident.

As long as the central political issue in Europe was immigration, things were actually easy for the center-right: the entire majority was substantially in agreement and the whole of Europe converged on identical positions. Now that that position has been occupied by foreign policy, rearmament and relations with Trump, everything becomes much more difficult . Internal divisions are amplified, the distance with Europe that a few months ago was almost imperceptible, is widening visibly. In a situation like this, it is not entirely fanciful to imagine that rift in the right that the Berlusconi family sometimes seems to almost hope for, the separation of FI from the two radical parties to give life, with Calenda's Azione, with + Europa and perhaps with Renzi 's Iv to a true centrist pole. If things were to go that way, all the maps of Italian politics would have to be radically redrawn.

A centrist pole between 12 and 15% would automatically impose itself as the swing vote. The electoral reform project with a rich majority bonus above 40% would vanish immediately: without that center, no one would reach the threshold. The political-telluric upheaval would actually be even more comprehensive. With the right wing deprived of its center, even Elly Schlein 's "stubbornly unitary" determination, the choice to ally herself at all costs with Conte's M5S, would falter. If a new electoral law eliminated the constituencies, effectively returning fully to proportional representation, there would be no need for it. But even with this law, the game in the constituencies would be, with four parties in the field, much more open and consequently much less restrictive.

It is, of course, a horizon that is essentially fantastic for now. But with some signals that make it less political fantasy: the dialogue between Azione and FI in Milan, which if it reaches any conclusion will have very different consequences from an expansion of the center-right to Azione, which is also difficult to imagine given the presence, unacceptable for Calenda , of the League. But the situation in Campania could prove even more important. If De Luca decides to withdraw from the PD and field his own candidate with Calenda, it will be in all respects a centrist pole that Forza Italia will not be able to do anything but look at with some more or less confessed interest, especially that of the South. Not that this is Elly Schlein's battle plan. Today she is aiming for the axis with the 5S and with Avs and the picture would not allow for another game plan. But in a moment marked by continuous earthquakes in the world framework, excluding that they will also be reflected in the internal picture by opening doors that until yesterday seemed sealed cannot be ruled out.

FROM

David Romoli