Italian left to pick nominee for prime minister

ROME: Italy’s main centre-left Democratic Party will hold hotly-contested primary elections on Sunday to select its nominee for prime minister in elections early next year that it is widely expected to win.
The main contest is between 61-year-old party leader Pier Luigi Bersani, a cigar-chomping ex-communist, and rising star Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence who looks to US President Barack Obama for inspiration.

“We have to show the rest of the world that we don’t just have (Mario) Monti,” Bersani, a former economic development minister, said this week.

“People want to take part, they want to have a politics that is in touch with the street, with the squares, that returns hope to the country,” he said.

Monti replaced Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister in November last year at the head of a technocratic government that spared Italy a Greek-style collapse but pushed through austerity measures that have angered many Italians.

Bersani has said he wants to maintain the course set by Monti in terms of promoting “discipline and credibility” but wants to do more to boost “employment and fairness” as Italy struggles through a painful recession. Some 800,000 people have signed up so far to vote in the primaries, which will start at 0700 GMT and end at 1900 GMT on Sunday in thousands of polling stations across Italy and around 20 countries with large Italian communities.

Voters have to sign a sort of manifesto in order to vote which invokes a “spirit of solidarity” and the “value of labour” as well as the desire “to archive the long season of Berlusconism and defeat every form of populism.”

The five candidates are Bersani and Renzi, as well as Nichi Vendola, governor of the Apulia region, Antonio Tabacci, a former Christian-Democrat, and Laura Puppato, a regional lawmaker who has called for a “green economy”.

A poll by the Cise/Luiss study centre on Thursday showed Bersani could win 48.2 percent of the vote — 10 points higher than Renzi at 37.6 percent.

Third-placed Vendola would win just 9.9 percent, according to the poll. The study also showed however that a leftist coalition led by Renzi could come out on top.

The report said that Bersani represented “the soul of the identity of the left” while Renzi had “more transversal appeal”.

In order to win in the first round, a nominee needs to secure a majority of the votes cast, otherwise there will be a run-off vote on December 2.

Political analyst Roberto D’Alimonte, one of the founders of Cise, said Bersani was almost certain to win but the turnout will prove crucial since a sharp influx of new voters could favour the younger Renzi.

“If we win on Sunday, the Democrats have more of a chance of winning” at the general election, said Renzi, who has conducted a US-style campaign on a bus around Italy under the slogan: “Let’s Change Italy Now!”

The choice between Bersani and Renzi is a real dilemma for Italy’s leftist electorate which is tempted to try novelty over tradition.

“Renzi has understood the heart of the problem: the Italian left has too much of an old-school image,” Stefano Folli, a political columnist for business daily Il Sole 24 Ore, told AFP.

“He had the intuition to go for the modern idea of a reformist left but has not managed to embody it to the full and has stopped half-way,” he said. Vendola has been deeply critical of the Florence mayor saying he was only “a specialist in good catchphrases”.

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