When De Mita asphalted Renzi on TV
Journalist Chiara Geloni remembers Ciriaco De Mita, who died today at the age of 94
He could be intimidating if you thought of his dizzying past as master of Italy, as they used to say. He could have seemed totally indifferent or even absent from what was happening around him, when he looked around absorbed, ready to take someone's arm and launch into one of his thoughts on the Transatlantic. Ciriaco De Mita was instead an ironic and affectionate person. When I got excited about his candidacy for mayor of Nusco – it was 2014, he was already almost ninety years old – and I wrote on my little blog that this was an extraordinary testimony of love for people and for politics, after a few days he phoned me : “I called to thank you. You can see that you wrote it with your heart ”. Then he stood there for half an hour to explain to me why it was not true that in 2008 he had left the Democratic Party: they had expelled him.
It happens to see it like this, to those who go away. Today I know something too. De Mita had lost his battle in the Democratic Party, but he was not the only one. He thought of a party made up of strong identities, which united without cultural complexes ("I have come to terms with Marxism. Perhaps it is Marxism that has not come to terms with me"); and instead the Pd was founded by the newists, the proponents of post ideology and then of the catch-all party. He had to remain on the sidelines not so much for a place on the list, but because he was a symbol, unlike others that could not be metabolized. And also because he undoubtedly had a bad character and a poor endowment of modesty and adaptability.
But was he wrong, De Mita? “The Democratic Party no longer exists. There are 'those of the Democratic Party', who do the most messed up things ”, he told me in that phone call, and it was 2014. We were at the beginning of the Renzian climb, of the total cultural failure that has not yet been overcome of that season. Would the same have happened to a party with stronger roots and greater self-awareness? I do not believe. And I'm talking about that and other crushes.
Against newism he took his revenge, in an epic television evening of 2016 . Matteo Renzi favored these two-way confrontations on the referendum, he liked to confront himself with the professors and the old wrecks to appear as the reformer of the Republic, the golden boy of the new politics. That evening at Mentana's the frame broke, against De Mita, and what was true appeared: newism was empty and arrogant, and old. "If politics is a profession it lasts a few years, if it is thought it lasts a lifetime", said De Mita that evening. Overwhelming the primacy of communication and the strategy of scrapping with a shot that shifted the playing field: vocation, value inspiration, representation.
De Mita spoke difficult and complex, it was almost impossible to summarize. But behind his reasoning as an intellectual of Magna Graecia (I doubt he would mind being called that) there was always the anecdote about his grandfather tailor, the sentence of his mother, the professions of the people in Nusco, the recommendation of an old priest. De Mita knew who he was and who he wanted to represent, and he knew the reality he wanted to change. And he had chosen and loved all his life the tool to do it: politics.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/quando-de-mita-asfalto-renzi-in-tv/ on Thu, 26 May 2022 09:40:57 +0000.