http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/matteo-renzi-pledges-sweeping-change-in-italy-a-858162.html
Matteo Renzi is on a crusade to become Italy’s next leader. With his calls for wholesale change in the political landscape, the mayor of Florence is generating excitement like few other recent Italian politicians. But his main opposition is coming from the bigwigs in his own party who would also get the boot if he won.
Last Monday, he was in Rome. A week earlier, he ploughed through northern Italy. In just two days, he made stops in 20 cities — from Mantua and Monza to Bergamo and Brescia — logging 3,250 kilometers (over 2,000 miles) in the process. Everywhere he went, the rooms were packed and the crowds were enthusiastic. Now his journey is taking him to southern Italy, starting with Naples.
The journey is being made in a white camper with the word “Adesso!”, or “Now!”, written in big letters on the exterior. Inside sits Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence. He is confident, relatively young for an Italian politician — and sparking fear within the establishment. He is determined to win this spring’s parliamentary election on his own, to become prime minister and to lead Italy for the next five years.
The resonance has been massive. More than anyone, young, Internet-savvy Italians are excited that someone is finally sounding the call to the barricades. After all, the older generation has yoked them with unemployment and debts. Even older conservatives who used to vote for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are jumping on the bandwagon. Fausto, for example, a self-employed construction engineer in his mid-50s, says: “If Renzi runs, he’ll get my vote!”
Fighting the Party Elders
Many of Renzi’s supporters are former left-wing voters who had stopped voting because they were disappointed by their parties. But now they are suddenly enthusiastic again. Many have donated to his online “Fai il pieno al camper” (“Fill Up the Camper”) campaign, which collects small donations in small increments starting at €5 ($6.50) to help bankroll his tour through Italy. By mid-Wednesday, the campaign had already collected almost €33,000 in donations.
Although Renzi’s campaign website already makes it seem like he’s on a triumphal procession, his race to the top has actually just begun. Before this stylish Florence native can prepare to conquer Italy, he must first win the battle to become his party’s leading candidate. To do that, he still has to win the primaries of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), an unhappy marriage of former communists and erstwhile supporters of the Christian Democracy party, which dominated Italian postwar politics until it was destroyed by corruption trials in the early 1990s.
This first step will perhaps be the hardest — particularly because not everyone in the PD is celebrating this political dynamo out of Florence. Many find him “abnormal” and “populist,” and some even detest him. The reason for this is clear: Renzi doesn’t just want to chase Berlusconi and his followers from the halls of power. He also wants to dethrone the leaders of his own party. “People who have hunkered down in parliament for 25 to 30 years cannot make decisions about our future!” he shouted at a recent political event in a marketplace. Italy needs “new faces,” he added, including in the PD. For that reason, he urges people to “consign to the garbage heap” veteran party bigwigs, including ex-Family Minister Rosy Bindi, ex-Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, ex-party secretary Walter Veltroni — and anyone else who comes to mind. In his eyes, they all need to go. Italians need to banish the generation of politicians that arose out of the student protest movement of the late 1960s to the history books, he says.
But the people he is referring to are determined to avoid this fate. Senior PD officials and the numerous factions within the party have worked to hammer out a deal that will see Pier Luigi Bersani, the party’s current leader, nominated as the party’s leading candidate and given the party’s blessing through a series of intraparty elections similar to presidential primaries in the United States.
For the first time in a long time, the party has a chance to become the strongest political force in the country after elections in the spring. Polls currently give the PD some 27 percent of the vote. Berlusconi’s right-wing People of Freedom (PdL) party, on the other hand, is languishing below the 20 percent mark. The Northern League, the PdL’s former coalition partner, polls at between 5 and 6 percent. And even the star of Beppo Grillo, the populist comedian turned political upstart, isn’t shining so bright anymore: The polls say he would hardly win more than 15 percent of the vote.
Given these circumstances, it is entirely possible that the PD could lead the next coalition government in Rome. If that happened, Bersani would be the prime minister, but there would of course also be choice political appointments for D’Alema, Bindi and the other members of the party brass.
