The Old Establishment Crank beat the Fresh Populist: does it matter?

Renzi and Bersani

A guy beat another guy in a Primary: big deal! Here’s a quick recap to understand some aspects of Italian politics; we can use what follows as a starting point, departing from there to get into more general stuff. In Italy the Partito Democratico (the most important party, founded in 2007) tried to mimic the US Democratic Party even in the choice of the name. It’s actually the inheritor, through a complicated series of transformations, of the defunct PCI (Italian Communist Party). Many things changed through the last 2 decades, but a strong sense of partisan commitment and a political apparatus that takes no prisoners are still a mainstay, a…

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