Election campaign in Italy: Letta between resignation and hope

In Italy, the Democratic Party was believed at the beginning of the election campaign to be the strongest party again this time. In the meantime, disillusionment has set in. Party leader Letta does not want to admit defeat just yet.

Enrico Letta is standing in his office on the top floor of the party headquarters in central Rome and looks content. The head of the Democratic Party PD has the only TV discussion duel with Giorgia Meloni behind him.

Not only his supporters attest to the 56-year-old’s victory on points against the right-wing politician who leads the polls. “I’m very satisfied,” says Letta, “I think it was an important argument.” It had become clear “that we stand for two very different ideas about Italy.”

A sense of achievement that Italy’s democrats urgently need on the home straight of the election campaign – even if the reach of the “TV duel” was manageable, since the debate with Meloni was only broadcast on the Internet portal of the largest daily newspaper Corriere della Sera due to media supervision requirements.

Dampened expectations

Letta’s problem: the PD is clearly behind in the polls. That hits the mood, also at the base. This can be felt, for example, in Bologna at the Festa dell’Unità, the big traditional party festival. Lorenzo Baldini is one of the many volunteers. When asked about his expectations for the election, he shrugs. He sees a lot of commitment from the chairman, but, says the 52-year-old, “personally I’m quite frustrated because the poll numbers aren’t good and the situation will probably be very negative for us centre-left parties in the end.”

Most opinion research institutes see the legal alliance around Meloni and her party, the Italian Brothers, at just under 50 percent, the Democratic Party with its few, small allies at not even 30 percent. On the home stretch of the election campaign, Letta now wants to focus on further escalation. “Our ideas are very, radically different from those of the right,” emphasizes the PD leader.

Pointing it out means “to convey to the Italians that this election is like the election in Great Britain for Brexit. There is no gray here”. On the one hand there are the ideas of the PD for Europe, for a society of civil rights, for the fight against climate change – and on the other hand the position of the right “with denial of climate change, against the expansion of civil rights, Eurosceptic or even against Europe.”

Different views of Europe

The Democratic Party, Letta emphasizes, stands for a clear stance against Putin in the Ukraine war. Following on from Mario Draghi’s policy and his trip to Ukraine with Scholz and Macron in June. “Our Italy,” the PD chairman put it, “is that of the photo of the train to Kyiv – Italy alongside Germany and France.” On the other side is Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, “which looks at Orban’s Hungary or at Poland”. Letta also wants to score points in the final phase with the topics of work, more opportunities for young people and tax relief for employees and companies.

However, critics, such as the politics professor Lorenzo Di Sio from the Luiss University in Rome, accuse Letta of making mistakes in the election campaign. The PD would have concentrated too much on warning Meloni and her post-fascist party, Brothers of Italy, against taking power. “The center-left alliance in Italy,” De Sio recalls, “has been successful, for example under Romano Prodi, when it has presented a project.” Saying “they or we” doesn’t catch on with the voters. According to De Sio, the PD’s current campaign lacks a future project that could convince voters.

Scholz as a role model

At the Democrats’ party headquarters, their hopes are clinging to the opinion pollsters’ statement that around 40 percent of Italians are still undecided. Letta, himself a soft-spoken man, cites Olaf Scholz as a role model when it comes to the election campaign and asks at the end of the ARD interview what the German word for “rimonta” is. It reads: catching up.

“I like Olaf Scholz very much, we are friends,” says Letta, “I appreciate him, also for how he won the election campaign.” Letta sees similarities with the German chancellor and successful election campaigner in the belief that politics should be serious and concrete. “As Olaf Scholz says,” says the PD chief, “we’re not here to apply to be circus directors.”