Tag: Matteo Renzi

Then he became the son. For years, Mr. Di Maio, a 32-year-old leader of Italy’s populist coalition government, attacked his political enemies by seeking to stain them with the alleged misconduct of their fathers. Recent news reports have charged that his father paid employees off the books and illegally built on his land outside Naples. On Monday, the elder Di Maio, who dabbled in post-fascist politics, posted a painful video on his Facebook page that was subsequently spread across Five Star social media. “I’m sorry for my son Luigi, who they are trying to attack,” he says, insisting his son knew nothing of his misdeeds and praising his “honesty, transparency and courage.” He demands that critics “leave my family alone” but argues that he had no choice but to hire workers off the books. Before Five Star came to power, its main target was Matteo Renzi of the Democratic Party, a former prime minister. “I’m convinced that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons,” Mr. Renzi wrote on Facebook after the program about Mr. Di Maio’s father aired. Mr. Renzi’s father recently wrote on Facebook that if he had done what Mr. Di Maio’s father had, Five Star “would already have launched an appeal on social networks for the return of the death penalty.” (This week, La Verità, another newspaper close to the populist government, alleged new improprieties, prompting Tiziano Renzi to deny that he and his son paid paperboys off the books when they operated a paper route decades ago in Florence.) “I’d like to look in the face Mr. Antonio Di Maio, the father of Luigi, and say I hope that he does not go through what his son and his friends put my father and my family through,” she said. Then the left-leaning newspaper la Repubblica published reports about his father illegally expanding their childhood home in Pomigliano D’Arco.

It’s fashionable to claim that progressive politics has been in decline across the western world since the global financial crash of 2008, that progressive politicians don’t know what they stand for anymore, and that parties of the far right and far left have been insurgent. At the core of our beliefs is the value of work – yet we acknowledge there is more to life than work. The centre-left administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown lost power in 2010, having won three general elections in a row since 1997. In elections last year, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) got 20.5 per cent of the vote, and the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) got just 5.7 per cent of the vote. These politicians respect the achievements of the wave of “third way” leaders of the Nineties and Noughties, but also recognise times have changed, which means different, modern solutions to today’s problems. New Zealand Labour’s 38-year-old Jacinda Ardern – who describes herself as a “progressive” and a “social democrat” – became leader of her party just three months before their general election in October 2017. She went on to become prime minister of a coalition government after substantially increasing Labour’s vote share. But the debate could be about so much more than this if we could lift our sights beyond the domestic to the international, drawing on fresh ideas and initiatives shown to work by progressives in power. This month, The Progressive Centre UK, a new think tank and network of progressives – to which I have been appointed chair – launches with the explicit aim of connecting progressives from across the UK with the latest ideas and experience from across the globe. As it happens, Ardern, Trudeau and Sanchez were all involved in the gathering the centre co-sponsored in Canada last month, organised by the Global Progress network.