The central role of an ex-elected in the case of corruption in the European Parliament reflects on his former party.
by Allan Kaval (Rome, correspondent)
The Italian left was already going badly. “Qatargate”, a corruption case in the European Parliament at the heart of which is a former Italian socialist MEP, adds a new crisis with multiple difficulties encountered by a political family already plunged into existential doubts by the results of the September elections.
Pier Antonio Panzeri, figure of the Lombard left, had been at the head of the Milanese branch of the General Italian Labor Confederation (CGIL) before being elected for three monitoring mandates in the European Parliament, the last two under The Democratic Party label (PD). Having detained since December 9, he is suspected by Belgian investigators to be the pivot of a network of corruption fueled by Qatar and Morocco and with which several Italian Brussels nationals are associated. If the scandal is first of all a European question and that Mr. Panzeri has long moved away from Italian bodies, his involvement in such a serious case plunged the representatives of his political universe of origin in disarray.
“M. Panzeri comes from our world, that of the defense of workers and the Italian left. This affair rejuvenates harshly on our image”, regrets Sergio Cofferati, former secretary general of the CGIL and former MEP of the PD. Since the “Qatargate” broke out, the newspapers linked to the progressive camp have looked at a major reason for Italian political culture, a totem of the transalpine left of four decades and which has since returned to the center of the debates: “The question morality. “The term is borrowed from an interview given to the daily La Repubblica in 1981 by Enrico Berlinguer, then secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and still serves as a compass to the center left. It designates the duty for the left to mark its “difference” by refusing to indulge in the supposed business of its political adversaries.
“sort of priest”
Forty years later, the world of Berlinguer, who died in 1984, has long disappeared, but this reference to the moral question resurfaced after the “Qatargate”. She leaves distraught elected officials, intellectuals and leftist journalists, already disoriented by the coming to power of the government of Giorgia Meloni, the most right of republican history. “For communication issues, the left had put its supposed morality at the heart of its speech, indexing its credibility on this idea”, recalls Mr. Cofferati.
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