The Italian Left is not simply divided — it is divided badly. Its fractures do not open up political possibilities, produce ideas, or build alternatives. They stage two versions of the same defeat: a government Left without a people and a protest Left without a project.

Fragmentation is the symptom, not the disease. The crisis stems from a long retreat: the Left has abandoned its foundational ground — work, wages, housing, public services, social protection, democratic sovereignty — and replaced it with something else. Depending on the case: adaptation to the system, a revived anti-Westernism, or the woke language of recognition.

The Establishment Democratic Party The Democratic Party (PD) long ago ceased to be a popular party and became the political guarantor of compatibility: with technocratic Europe, with Atlanticism turned into an automatic reflex, with liberal-globalized capitalism, and with a form of modernization that has too often asked the popular classes to adapt to their own marginalization.

The PD belongs fully to this trajectory: it does not correct it; it embodies it. It represents one of its most accomplished forms — institutional, urban, educated, perfectly integrated into an order it once should have questioned. It speaks the language of rights, Europe, innovation, inclusion, sustainability. Often, these are the right words; the problem is who speaks them, from where, and to whom they appear to be addressed.

The PD struggles to be perceived as the party of those who work, those who are losing income, those who live on the outskirts, those who cannot afford rent, those who look at the ecological transition and see a cost before they see a promise. Its modernity too often coincides with the point of view of those who already possess the tools to navigate it.

Here lies the crack within the PD: it has turned governability into an identity, and responsibility into prior acceptance of existing constraints. It has ended up treating the system as the natural horizon within which to demonstrate reliability, rather than as a field to be questioned. In this passage, it has lost its connection with social conflict, with material life, with that part of the country that is not asking to be educated into modernity, but to avoid being crushed by it.

The Protest Without a Project Around the PD, and often against it, move various parties, movements, and intellectuals — from Alessandro Di Battista and his association Schierarsi, to the Agorà movement of Angelo D’Orsi, and Maurizio Acerbo’s Rifondazione Comunista — who claim to represent an alternative, yet end up repeating an old repertoire: left-wing sovereigntism, campist nostalgia, the street against Parliament, the West as original sin.

The radical Left sees the distance between the PD and the popular classes, denounces it, and yet fails to bridge it. It intercepts real anger and translates it into an old........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)