Yesterday Pier-Luigi Bersani was elected leader of the Partito Democratico. This post is one in a series of posts analyzing the leadership contest, and looks at the programmatic statements of each of the three candidates (Bersani, Franceschini, and Marino).

The benefit of holding a national party congress prior to primary elections lies not only in giving cues to potential primary voters, but also in requiring each candidate to issue a programmatic statement, or motion, to be voted on at the congress.

These motions are useful not as indications of future policies the party intends to pursue: they are, with certain exceptions, entirely too vague to serve as manifestos.

Rather, they are useful for differentiating between the candidates’ different positions.

(In this sense, although the method of leader selection used by the Partito Democratico represents a considerable institutional innovation, it also harks back to the past: each motion contains just as much studied ambiguity and re-iteration of common tropes as did the motions of the party congresses of the First Republic; and the support given to each motion has also been scrutinized to give indications of the size of each faction within the party, just as in the First Republic).

Nor are these motions intended for external consumption. If they were, they would not be so harsh about the PD’s record so far.

The motions from Franceschini and Bersani are strongly critical of the party’s strategy. Such criticism might be expected from Bersani, who has long been a critic of the “vocazione maggioritaria” pursued by Veltroni. Indeed, Bersani does not disappoint, and opens his motion with criticism of the vocazione maggioritaria and the rootlessness of the party.

Yet Franceschini too criticises the party for not having communicated clear and unambiguous messages, garnishing this criticism with praise for Berlusconi (“Berlusconi stesso nel 1994 rappresentava una proposta di cambiamento — illusoria, ma era una proposta di cambiamento… se voti destra sai cosa voti, se voti di qua non sai cosa voti” [Berlusconi himself in 1994 represented an idea of change -- an illusory one, but an idea of change nonetheless... if you vote for the right, you know who you're voting for; if you vote for the left, you don't]).

Bersani’s motions is the shortest and least specific of the three motions, which likely reflects the unusual nature of his electoral coalition and his front-runner status.

It is the most left-wing of the three motions insofar as it represents a strong pro-labour ideology: inequality is the product of labour’s ever-decreasing share of producer surplus, and as such should be challenged; employment ought to be dignified; and workplace security is to be secured.

This pro-labour ideology occasionally receives aid from unfamiliar quarters — the Pope’s June 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate is cited as a demonstration of increased attention to global and national inequalities. At the same time, Bersani’s trademark emphasis on liberalization of service industries remains and, like Marino, Bersani acknowledges the necessity of increasing the age of retirement.

Franceschini’s motion is the longest and is the only one written in the first person.

Although all three candidates praise merit-based recruitment, Franceschini’s motion is, of the three, the most favourable towards meritocracy and equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.

There is, throughout the text and particularly in the call for a new reformism, a link to New Labour, explicitly acknowledged in the reference to Tony Blair’s famous dictum, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” (which is softened somewhat in the Italian translation).

Franceschini’s text indeed reads more like that of a former Blairite than a former democristiano: marginally greater attention to the family is perhaps the only instance of classically Christian Democratic preoccupations seeping through.

As the outsider candidate, Marino was able to permit himself the luxury of a more specific motion which is also distinguished by its reference to issues which excite the base of the party but which fail to move the country as a whole: his motion is, for example, the only motion which explicit mentions the role of the media, or which gives more than a brief nod to the environment.

It is also noteworthy for attempting to substitute ‘flexiblity’ (“an inevitable characteristic of modern work”) for the usual discourse on precarieta’: flexibility “need not be considered a disgrace” as long as it is carried out alongside continued professional development. This position can only be described as courageous.

Laicita’, so much a part of Marino’s campaign, is not given much rhetorical emphasis, but a long list of policy commitments does (civil unions, passage of legislation on living wills, passage of a law against homophobia) bear out the common depiction of Marino as the anti-clerical candidate.

There is, therefore, enough difference of emphasis in the three motions to bear out the common picture of Bersani as standing to the left of Franceschini, with Marino difficult to place on left-right issues but fairly clear on clerical/secular issues.

These differences of emphasis, however, are muted in comparison with the differences of position in terms of party strategy.

In line with his emphasis on reform and change, Franceschini frames the issue of the choice of coalition partner as a choice between the past and future. “We will not go back to the time of fragmented and litigious coalitions… even hypothesising so means declaring the PD a failed experiment”.

For Bersani, the question is rather a question of roots: from the Ulivo we came, and to the Ulivo — or to some form of grande alleanza democratica — we shall return, instead of falling into the “shortcut of a political modernism [nuovismo politico]“.