Renzi Loses Ground As Italy Displays Multi-Party Corruption at Regional Levels

The low turnouts fell even lower as the electors abandoned the ballottaggi during last week.  Consequently the  more disciplined factions of the Partito Democratico, the old-style party cadres were able to take more of the contested seats in regional elections than might have been expected.  That doesn't mean anything much in  terms of national elections, or balance of power  within the PD - over-excited claims of confining the Florentines to the banks of the Arno or at least within Tuscany came from mistaking Party commitment as the defeat of the more fluid, Movement-style support available to Renzi when it matters in national elections.

However, the flood of arrests, helping-the-police-with-enquiries, and revelations of the scale of involvement of the PD in 'social' funding expenditures, from the mass subsidy of the 'red' co-operatives, the provision of social housing, to the profits to be made from migrant handling using EU funds, has been horrific to read about.  The abandonment of any commitment to the ostensible social justice goals of the PD at local and regional level, particularly in Rome and the South in favour of the mafia-isation,  the self-enrichment,  and the entrenching  of compliant personnel in local, and regional structures still surprises.  The Right is supposed to do this sort of thing, and indeed it is through the allies on his right in the current Italian  government coalition that Renzi has been bathed in this sewage.  But it is his own Party, the Democratic Party in all its miserable compliance with the worst mafia undertakings and practices, that has put his government in question.  Not a shift to the Left in the PD but  the revelation that while none of them are worth voting for only the Left in the PD can still stomach doing so.