MUCH AS expected, former cabinet minister Pier Luigi Bersani was elected as the new leader of Italy’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Party (PD) at the weekend. In commenting on his victory in an election rendered necessary by the resignation last February of party leader Walter Veltroni, the new figurehead drew attention to what he called “a great victory for the PD”.
Here, Mr Bersani was referring to the participation in and organisation of an electoral contest which saw just over three million people turn out to vote.
Given that the electoral weekend had begun with the resignation of Piero Marrazzo, the PD governor of the Lazio region around Rome, caught up in a sex and drugs scandal, there were those who had feared a low turn-out from the party faithful.
In the party’s last primary election in October 2007, more than 3½ million people turned out to elect Mr Veltroni.
The son of a car mechanic, 58-year-old Bersani entered politics in the 1980s in the ranks of the old PCI (Italian Communist Party). From Piacenza in the region of Emilia-Romagna, he appeared to be the most traditionally left-wing of the three candidates who contested the leadership election.
Mr Bersani, sponsored by senior party figures led by former prime minister Massimo d’Alema, ran out an overwhelming winner, claiming 54 per cent of the vote, as opposed to the 34 per cent returned by the interim leader, ex-Christian Democrat Dario Franceschini and the 12 per cent of former heart surgeon Ignazio Marino.
Blessed with a formidable intellect but not with an appealing tele-visual presence, Mr Bersani conducted a primary election campaign that produced neither thunderbolts of inspiration nor howling gaffes. Not for nothing, he ran with the slogan: “Bersani. In Safe Hands”.
He faces a difficult task since he assumes control of a party which has lost more than two million votes in the last 18 months and which, in the best traditions of the Italian left, has lost a lot of time in internal squabbles. In that context, he appeared to extend an olive branch to party rivals with his initial comments as leader, saying: “At this point, I’m the party leader, but I will do it my way. This will not be the party of one man, one big boss, but rather a collective of protagonists.”
As regards the Marrazzo prostitute scandal, Rome daily La Repubblica yesterday claimed that centre-right prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was the first person to inform the Lazio region governor a compromising film of him in the company of transsexual prostitutes was doing the rounds of various magazine and newspaper offices. It seems the carabinieri who blackmailed Mr Marrazzo also attempted to sell a “revealing” film to Chi, a gossip magazine owned by Mr Berlusconi.
The editor of Chi declined to purchase the film but he did inform his boss, the prime minister’s daughter, Marina, who runs the Mondadori publishing house.