The Socialist Odyssey. Nenni, Lombardi, Craxi (Rubettino publisher), the new book by Fabrizio Cicchitto, presented yesterday in the Sala della Regina at the Chamber of Deputies, by the Rel Foundation (Reformism & Freedom of Cicchitto himself) and the Craxi Foundation, directed by Nicola Carnovale, is a personal and political story that speaks of the past to launch a powerful and also dramatic message to today’s politics.
Cicchitto launches it: “The judicial elimination of the PSI and Bettino Craxi with the ‘Tangentopoli’ coup left a great void of reformism on the left but also on the right. And now the left heir of the old PCI, which chose the judicial path, without socialist reformism finds itself chasing the Five Star Movement and Giuseppe Conte with their judicialism and foreign policy shifted towards China.”
But current events find a deep root, unfortunately, that starts from very far back, even before “Clean Hands” and originates in that clash between communist maximalism and reformist socialism that “contributed to the advent of fascism.” “The Odyssey” narrated by Cicchitto, as Aldo Cazzullo says, introducing the debate, coordinated by Annalisa Bruchi, with the book’s author, Pier Ferdinando Casini, Stefania Craxi, Sergio Pizzolante, Claudio Signorile, Luciano Violante, is “a novel, indeed a tragedy.” Ending with Craxi’s death in exile in Hammamet. A tragedy in which socialist reformists were branded by the communists “as semi-fascists, from Filippo Turati to Giacomo Matteotti himself,” is recalled in the Sala della Regina.
To bring us closer to our days, Violante, who comes from the PCI, acknowledges that the post-communist left, in order to govern through elections, needed a Romano Prodi. But it is not enough, Stefania Craxi reminds him, to be able to move forward “one must come to terms” with the liquidation of the PSI and its leader through judicial means, because “it was not a parenthesis.” “These are written, known things, even Gerardo Chiaromonte (of the PCI’s reformist minority, ed.) told Craxi that socialist unity was not possible because his comrades had chosen to come to power through the judicial path,” Craxi recalls.
The result today is, Cicchitto warns, “that the PD finds itself chasing the Five Star Movement.” The new maximalists.
