A Brief History of the Italian Democratic Party and Its (Declining) Support

The creation of the Democratic Party (PD), from a certain point of view, was the realisation of Moro’s and Berlinguer’s dream of the past century, the so-called Compromesso storico (“Historic Compromise”), an attempt to achieve an agreement between what had been the most popular political traditions in Italian society: progressive Catholicism on the one hand and socialism-communism on the other. The PD, created in 2007 by bringing together the two main elements of the Italian centre-left—the Democratici di Sinistra (Left Democrats, DS) and the “Margherita” (Daisy)—had tried to unify in a unique party all the political forces of a coalition which, in the previous 13 years of the so-called Second Republic, was the principal antagonist of Berlusconi. According to Michele Salvati, the time had come to put aside the assumptions of the twentieth century and fully embrace the new one by establishing a reformist entity capable of presenting itself as a credible party of government, “in order to create a new, liberal, identity for the left” (Il Partito Democratico. Alle origini di un’idea politica, il Mulino, Bologna 2003); for until then, in Italy as in other European countries, the parties of the left had lost sight of their “third vocation”, namely, the capacity to speak to the entire country and not just to their own constituency. It was a thesis which had already been expounded some decades earlier by a perspicacious Anglo-American political scientist, Henry Drucker (Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, George Allen & Unwin, London 1979), an acute observer of the evolution of the UK Labour Party. This chapter summarises the main events that took place within the Democratic Party, as well as its role in the political context of the country.